


Double Cross

by rivkat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Other, Winsister
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-11-16
Updated: 2008-11-16
Packaged: 2017-10-02 03:16:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 38,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivkat/pseuds/rivkat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Searching for a solution to their divine problem, Sam and Dean meet a newcomer who really shouldn't be there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Double Cross

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to kindly betas giandujakiss, geekturnedvamp, and meret. Cover by meret, visible at http://pics.livejournal.com/rivkat/pic/00015trh.

"Shit," Dean repeated, a little muffled by the hand he'd clasped over his mouth. "Shit."

Sam would've told him to shut up if he hadn't been occupied fighting the urge to vomit. He rarely sloshed around in quite so much blood—he was soaked like a modern-day Elizabeth Bathory. Still, the blood wasn't the real problem. It was the other things: the viscera, the shit and half-digested food, stinking sharp in his nostrils so that he wished for the clean metal scent of blood alone or even the rotten eggs of demon trace.

"Sam?" Dean sounded like he was hanging onto control by two fingernails and force of will. Dean always had to be the toughest guy in the room. Or abattoir, whatever.

Sam's head hurt.

Not surprising, really, when you considered exactly how many hard surfaces Lilith's minions had bounced it against. That, and the explosion of demonic powers near the end, when he'd thought it was their only hope of keeping the seal intact.

Good job on that, all around.

"Sammy?" Dean's hands on his shoulders were rough, and the fabric of his jacket squelched under the pressure of Dean's fingers.

"Yeah," he slurred. He wasn't sure how Dean had fought free of the cage they'd put him in. Jesus, the cage. He could still see it, like it was burned into his eyelids: strips of metal in the outline of a man. Except that the one they'd put Dean in had spaces in the back, where wings might extend. He turned his head, as much effort as cranking the jack to change one of the Impala's tires, and saw the raw and bleeding flesh around Dean's mouth where the scold's bridle had bitten deep.

"Let's get out of here." Dean pulled him up and urged him to throw his arm around Dean's shoulder, even though that meant Dean also got covered in gore. As Dean shuffled them out of the old warehouse-cum-deathtrap, he kept up a running commentary on the untrustworthiness of angels and how pathetic it was that Castiel had no one better to send than the Winchesters.

"I mean, c'mon," Dean said, with a hollow cheer that was as horrifying as the blood drying all down Sam's back, "we're total badasses, but anybody can be outgunned." He pushed Sam into the passenger seat, then leaned over him to pull out the seatbelt and fasten it around Sam's waist.

Dean nattered on as he started the car and got them on the road. Sam only realized much later how completely thrown Dean was, because Dean didn't pause to put towels down before shoving Sam in, even though none of the blood was Sam's.

Dean had yet to say anything real. Presumably he was saving the true postgame analysis for Castiel, who might have a useful response. He hadn't wasted time on theorizing with Sam for a couple of months now.

'God only knows what Dean's thinking' used to be a metaphor.

He had wanted to believe that Dean had come back to him. But, no matter how hard he tried, it seemed like Dean had only come back.

"Are you going to leave?" he asked abruptly, interrupting Dean's blood-blurred musings on the nature of the number sixty-six. After tonight's inadvertent massacre _and_ what had happened in Idaho, he'd be a fool not to be prepared.

"What?" Dean sputtered to a halt. "No, I am not going to—you get that out of your head right now, you hear?"

Sam chuckled. "There's plenty of other stuff in there not going anywhere."

Dear threw him a nervous glance, his hands gripping the wheel hard, like Castiel's must have held him to pull him from the Pit. "This was just—you didn't—"

"I didn't what, Dean? Didn't mean it? Well, that's real reassuring. 'Cause we're so rarely in mortal danger."

Sam wished he was driving. Dean had to keep his eyes on the road, but all Sam could do was contemplate the thousand ways in which they were fucked.

"Maybe you _should_ leave."

Dean sucked in air. A couple of the new-formed scabs burst and fresh blood stained the corners of his mouth. "Yeah, next suggestion."

Pain and fear made Sam reckless. "Okay, how's this: I start training again, so that I'm not just lashing out when there's no other choice. We tried it your way." Dean winced, and Sam knew that he was thinking of the dozens of dead bodies left behind them, counting them on that running tally Dean kept of times he hadn't been good enough. He barrelled on, because that was not a fight he could afford right now. "I haven't been using the powers and you know what, it hasn't stopped any of the rest of it. We are _losing_ and we need to try something else."

Dean was silent, struggling for a response, opening and closing his mouth. Sam watched the muscles of his jaw work. The blood on his face was mostly clotted now, the wounds more superficial than Sam had feared. The circles under Dean's eyes were as dark as a predawn sky.

At last, Dean cleared his throat. "Bobby says he heard from a crazy lady in Virginia, might know somethin' useful."

Dean wouldn't be mentioning this now if he hadn't been desperate. He'd obviously dismissed it earlier and only resurrected the reference to distract Sam.

That was okay. They could fight about the powers, the rapidly dwindling number of seals, and everything else that was wrong just as easily in Virginia as anywhere else. Dean couldn't change the facts. The night before last, most of the skies over South America had rained blood.

Sam didn't ask what they had to lose, because he knew exactly what was left. "Let's go to Virginia," he said instead.

****

The little shop in Herndon had a neon sign in the window, a red outline of a hand with an eye in the palm. A handwritten sign informed them that readings were fifteen dollars.

Inside, the place was even smaller than it looked from the outside, all draped in red cloth that spilled over the walls and tables and chairs like some horrific skin disease had attacked. Yellow light fixtures stuck out of the walls at random intervals, pushing back the darkness a few feet. The floor was sticky under their boots and the air smelled of cheap vanilla candles and old Chinese food, probably from the restaurant down the block. Underneath that was something darker, richer, somewhere between sweat and blood.

Sam shivered, even though the air was humid.

The beads that served as a near-doorway rustled, glinting red-black. The fortune-teller emerged. She was small and round, thick in the middle but with tiny feet, all dressed in black. Her hair was short and black as well, with a fringe of white around the edges, not like it was dyed but more like a pigeon's banded wings. She was followed by a dirty-white ball of fur, black-nosed and wearing a Christmas sweater despite the time of year (and despite the fact that it was a dog and shouldn't be wearing any kind of sweater). The dog looked like the yippy kind, but it made no noise other than the click of claws on the tile floor. It stared at them. Sam couldn't see any white around the deep brown irises, almost as if the dog were possessed.

Sam reached out for Dean, settled a hand on his arm and felt immediately better.

"Good afternoon," she said.

"Hi," Sam began. Dean just folded his arms over his chest, ever the skeptic. "We were sent here by a friend of ours, Bobby Singer."

The fortune-teller tilted her head. "I've never met Mr. Singer in person. But in these dark days, anyone who knows more than a little can be an ally."

"Yeah, whatever," Dean said. "You got anything that might help us with our problem?"

She smiled, close-lipped, like the Cheshire Cat. "Are you willing to change your world?"

Sam glanced at Dean, who looked equally puzzled. Given that they were heading towards the Final Battle, Sam would have thought that world-changing was already on the table. "Sure," Dean said. "Long as when we're done there's still a world and not some, you know, eternal fire. Or eternal harps and clouds." Before he went to Hell, Dean would have added some crack about how both would be equally awful. He didn't say things like that any more, even if he pretended not to remember.

The fortune-teller, of course, didn't know that Dean had anything to repress. "Very well," she said. Her dog barked then, just once. Sam would have expected squeakiness, but it was a deep sound that should have come from a larger animal. "Your solution is waiting for you."

The world went midnight blue for a split second, Dean and the fortune-teller and everything else disappeared into color so intense Sam could almost taste it, cool and heavy. But then the yellow light and the gross red drapes were back, and Dean didn't seem to have noticed anything, so Sam straightened out of his slouch. "Waiting where?"

The fortune-teller turned and started back into the depths of her store. She held up a hand dismissively; the little dog turned tail as well, shaking its ass at them.

"Well, that was mysterious and crappy," Dean said, staring death at the ghostly blur of the dog disappearing.

Sam stifled a sigh. "We knew it was a long shot," he pointed out.

Bobby's leads were all that they had. He didn't dare talk to Ruby for more than a few seconds at a time, especially not after Idaho, so everything they knew came either from Bobby's scraps of lore or from Castiel.

Castiel had been close-mouthed, other than to tell them that there were some seals that demons simply couldn't break on their own. After the business with Samhain, which they hadn't even known had involved a seal when they first found the hunt, Castiel had been sending them (well, Dean, but Dean was a package deal) to clean up demonic messes surrounding the breakage, or failure to break, of various other seals. The most recent disaster had been the first time they'd been sent out in advance of the action, and given how well that had gone it seemed likely that the angels had pulled them up from the minors for lack of any other resources.

Once again, there was nothing he could do about it. "Let's get back," he suggested. Bobby had also sent them a few books, and at least he could get started reading them at the motel.

****

Dean dawdled in the parking lot, examining the car's exterior. The worse things got, the more attention Dean lavished on the Impala. Dean was washing her every couple of days now. Sam hadn't said anything about it, of course, but a few weeks back he'd bought Dean a special chamois that promised extra-gentle care. If the world was coming to an end, he wanted Dean to know that something in his life had been done right. He'd felt like an idiot handing it over, but Dean had smiled at him, that full-on lightning strike that could power a small city, and Sam had forgotten how badly they were fucked until that night, when Dean had returned from grabbing dinner with another message from Castiel.

Now, Sam waited for Dean to catch up, then opened the motel door, stepped inside, and froze.

The woman pointing two guns at them—crossdraw underarm holsters under her leather jacket, Sam noted: superbly cool—was Dean's wet dream even without the guns. Pouty pink lips; wide evergreen eyes; a hint of freckles to add wholesomeness. Her shoulder-length wavy hair was blonde, honey-brown at the roots, another of those easy-girl signals like the Saran Wrap-tight jeans and motorcycle boots. Her garnet-red top was snug enough that they both probably would have stopped in their tracks even if she'd been otherwise unarmed.

"Who the fuck are you?" she asked. When her mouth moved, Sam could see that she'd covered up some pretty serious damage around her lips. The welts were strange; she hadn't just been punched.

Sam had other things to worry about. He kept his hands up and checked to make sure Dean was doing the same. Dean was squinting at her, a mixture of shaken and pissed. "This is our room," Sam pointed out.

"Well, how did you get me here?" The guns were still trained directly on them, no sign that they were too heavy for her to hold for long. The look of concentration on her face was both super-sexy and oddly familiar.

Dean snorted. "Get you here? Sweetheart, we don't—"

"Wait a second," Sam said, raising his hand further, which miraculously worked to stifle Dean. "The fortune-teller, she said the solution would be waiting for us."

"Fortune-teller?" the woman asked. "Crazy lady, crazy dog?" Sam nodded. "She told me she'd fix my problem if I walked outside. I did, there was a big boom, and here I am."

"Maybe we're supposed to help each other," Sam suggested. "It would fit a lot of the lore. Good fortune comes to those who do good for strangers." The woman raised an eyebrow skeptically—again Sam felt a shock of recognition, like déjà vu without the first time—but some of the tension went out of her shoulders.

"I don't think that includes strangers who go around pointing guns at people!" Dean complained. "And also, we've got bigger problems than doing favors for random hot chicks."

"I seriously doubt your problems are bigger than mine," the woman said, tossing her head as she returned the guns to their holsters, a procedure that did interesting things to her chest.

"You'd be surprised," Sam said. "Sam and Dean Winchester."

She drew the guns again, and Dean threw himself sideways, pushing Sam to the floor in a painful jumble of knees and elbows.

"Stay down!" she yelled, then "Drop it or lose the hand." Sam heard the clunk of Dean's gun falling to the floor, then the scrape of it being kicked away from them. Sam was trying to work his gun around to where Dean could grab it from between their bodies, but it was going to take at least half a minute. Dean was still lying on as much of Sam as he could cover. Later on, Sam was going to point out to him that he wasn't exactly the right size to work as Sam's human shield.

Of course, Dean might not just be attempting to give Sam cover in case this was another hunter out to circumvent the End Times by ending the Antichrist. He might be trying to protect the woman from _Sam_. As far as Dean knew, Sam's powers were limited to line-of-sight.

"Don't lie to me," the woman said, ice crackling in her voice. "Try again: Who the fuck are you?"

Dean stilled above him. Sam agreed: that wasn't the reaction he would have expected.

"I'd say check our wallets, but I don't think the ID would match," Sam managed, pushing Dean off and rolling himself to a sitting position, his hands open and empty. "I don't know what you've heard about us, but I don't have horns and Dean doesn't have wings, if that's what—"

He stopped when she jerked the gun at him. "My name," she said, "is Dee Winchester. I think I'd know if we had any relatives who were hunters."

"Right back atcha," Dean said. He was also sitting, though Sam could tell that he was preparing to launch himself across the room, because he was a damn fool like that.

"We?" Sam asked.

"Me and Samantha," she said, as if it were obvious. "My little sister."

Crazy as it was, Sam immediately saw the resemblance: the strong line of the jaw with the slight softness under the chin, the model-quality cheekbones, the full lips that just begged to be swollen further with kisses. The leather thong around her neck, dipping below her neckline, where an amulet might be hiding. And the cuts around her mouth, as if someone had shoved a metal bit—

"Wait a second," Sam said, directed more at Dean than at Dee. Dee? Jesus. "Okay, when were you born?"

"What does that—fine. January 24, 1979."

Beside him, Dean sucked in a surprised breath.

"Parents John and Mary Winchester, from Lawrence, Kansas?"

She nodded, even as he saw her fingers tighten on her guns. "Sam," Dean complained, packing a wealth of denial into his name. Sam ignored him, running through everything he knew about alternate universes, which wasn't much. It was more physics class than magic, but he'd survived a repeating day and a number of other even more implausible scenarios, so he was prepared to float almost any hypothesis.

"Your sister Samantha was born May 2, 1983, six months before your mother died in a fire. She grew up, went to Stanford, until—" He couldn't finish, but that was all right, because Dee didn't look like she wanted to hear it either.

"How do you know all that?" Dee asked, the furrow between her brows just like Dean's. She was plainly prepared to kill him for giving the wrong answer.

"I think the fortune-teller may have grabbed you from a parallel reality," he said. Out loud, it sounded kind of stupid, which was reinforced by the way both Dee and Dean looked at him like he'd just suggested that they team up to fight demons with Harry Potter and his friends. "Change your world," he reminded Dean. "_Your_ world, she said, which is kind of funny wording unless there's something up here."

"Sam?" Dean asked, meaning, do you really have a clue and should I still be trying for the gun?

"It's okay," he said, bringing his legs together so that he wasn't sprawled quite so ridiculously. He still felt awkward, sitting on the floor like a kindergartener, but if he didn't get shot he could live with looking ludicrous.

"There are plenty of theories that say there are an infinite number of worlds, some involving just a single variation from our own," he began.

If he hadn't already been convinced of his own theory, Dee's 'please notice I'm bored' expression, a slightly smaller version of Dean's, would have sold him. "Bottom line," he hurried, "you're not from around here. You're an alternate version of Dean and your sister is an alternate version of me."

"Let's say I buy this Star Trek bull," Dee said. "Why'n hell would bringing me here solve my problem?"

"Just so we're clear," Dean said, "your problem is that God wants you to be His holy warrior, which troubles you because it seems like you might be heading towards killing your—sister, and also because you aren't real impressed with God anyway?"

Sam fought to keep his face from showing his shock. Even after Idaho, Dean had never been so forthright about the possibility that Castiel's mission was not a Winchester-friendly one on balance.

"Got it in one," Dee said.

"I think we need to go back to that fortune-teller," Sam said.

At last, Dee put her guns away, and when she nodded Dean retrieved his own, standing warily while Sam also rose to his feet.

****

Sam hadn't thought that Dean would come out and say that Sam might need killing, but he'd known about the problem for a while. It had become undeniable after Idaho.

Dean had been playing dumb about Castiel's ultimate plan for months, and Dean could give good dumb when he felt the necessity. But then a group of ten demons got the jump on them in Nampa, and before Sam could even start to worry about using the knife on them all or being forced to use his powers, Dean went all white and clammy, breathed in deep, and said, "Depart." His voice shook with harmonics, a fucking angelic choir trumpeting in his voice. And it was _demons_ who supposedly said their name was Legion; propaganda, every word of it.

As Sam later reconstructed events, all ten of the demons had abandoned their hosts (eight of whom lived), which was a good deal because Dean had been too busy catching Sam's dead weight to defend himself.

Demon powers, it seemed, came with demon vulnerabilities. Sam had been cleaned up and lying down on a motel bed when he'd come to, but the headache, lingering weakness in his limbs, and, oh yeah, the stained and bloody clothes in the dumpster that Dean hadn't had time to burn had been pretty good testimony to the fact that Dean's Voice of Authority was anathema to Sam.

And that was setting aside how very much it sucked to be outclassed in demon control by Dean. Of course, Sam's technique was more impressive, because he was fighting against his nature, whereas Dean was just doing what he'd been supposed to do. And he'd exorcised Samhain, which anyone would have to concede had been top-level work. But Sam's theoretical superiority of willpower didn't mean as much when Dean had been able to blast ten demons back to Hell with a single word.

Sam was pretty sure that obsessing over comparative demon-exorcising throw weight was the kind of thing that was likely to take him further down the demonic path. His heart had rotted in a shallow grave for four months; he hadn't practiced safe morals in a long time, and the uncomfortable truth was that he was more vulnerable to darkness than he wanted to be, especially when there was a threat to Dean.

In any event, when he'd woken up, Dean had been sitting on the other bed facing him, shoulders hunched (weighed down by invisible wings, perhaps) and hands clasped (not praying).

"What the hell happened?" Sam had croaked, which of course had only made Dean laugh. Except that the laughter had quickly turned into a panic attack, forcing Sam to get up, shaky and nauseated, and wrap himself around Dean in what was half calming hug and half propping himself up.

Eventually, when Dean had recovered himself enough to push Sam away, he sketched out a divine mission to win the apocalypse, complete with instruction from Castiel that sounded disturbingly like Ruby's lessons. Dean had sworn he hadn't believed that his role was significant, not until he'd been forced to try and confronted with unmistakable evidence.

Dean could deny like a closeted Republican congressman, but some things were too obvious for that. He'd finished his explanation and stared down at his hands. "He said that if it worked on you it meant that you weren't free of the, you know, taint. I was sure—because you stopped, Sam." He'd sounded very young.

"I'm sorry," Sam had said. He had been. He'd been sorry he hadn't had the strength to pull Dean up from Hell himself; he'd been sorry that Castiel didn't trust him; he'd been most sorry that he had hurt Dean.

"I don't—all my life, I thought I was a weapon. Cool, you know?" Dean had refused to meet Sam's eyes; the lines around his eyes had been deeper than usual. His hands had twisted together, his fingers worrying his ring relentlessly. "But this—I feel like I'm bein' emptied out. Castiel called me the Lord's vessel, Sam. I think that means God's gonna throw out whatever's in me that's in the way."

Dean's story explained a lot about his silence over the past months, the way the car seemed to have grown ten times larger, the space between them uncrossable. The thing in Dean that was in God's way—Sam knew full well whose name was on it.

If Dean had been the only one changed and changing, Sam could have handled it, he was sure. His demon blood, however, was remarkably insensitive to Sam's emotional needs, and refused to give him time to adjust.

In the past few months, Sam had occasionally felt a sensation like a scab was being ripped off, if the scab was his entire skin. The first time had been when Samhain had risen, though he'd thought it was just backlash from the summoning ritual at the time. Each time, he felt invisibly larger, the demon blood in him surging like Azazel's gift was replacing another chunk of his natural body. In fact, the power boost was probably what had enabled him to defeat Samhain in the end. After four more occurrences, he'd finally correlated the feeling of involuntary expansion with Castiel's belated reports that another seal had fallen.

Added to that, in some of the apocryphal texts he consulted, there were brothers: one from above, and one from below. In ordinary time, brothers represented balance, opposing forces in perfect tension, but in Armageddon days they signalled mutual assured destruction.

Sam didn't want to be starring in some Isaac and Ishmael drama. But he hadn't been in charge of casting.

****

Dee initially headed to the driver's side of the Impala, but when Dean cut her off, she still managed to get into the front passenger seat before Sam did, mostly because he was hanging back to observe her. Now that he thought she was probably a Bizarro Dean, it was a little freaky to be noticing her incredible ass, but her jeans made noticing unavoidable. And it wasn't like they were actually related. At least he thought so. They never covered the important things in physics class.

In the car, Dean and Dee swapped biographical details, staying carefully away from sensitive topics. Based on the hunts Dee recalled, their worlds seemed identical except for the Winchester gender-swap. Dean's photographic memory for awful roadside motels turned out to be extremely useful. By the time they'd reviewed an even dozen of the South's greatest hits, Dean was convinced that Dee was some version of him, and, filtering Dee's reactions through his Dean-vision, Sam thought that she was also on board.

"... So then Sam sticks his head in their room and says—"

"'Where are the ashes?'" Dee finished. "'Dad, you said he was getting his ashes hauled.'"

They both snorted as Sam turned red, even though he had _nothing_ to be embarrassed about. "Yeah," Dean said nostalgically, "that was pretty much the last time Dad forgot little Sammy had big ears, and he never gave up on a question."

Dee twisted in her seat and looked back at him, her expression softer than it had been since she'd shown up. "Still doesn't," she said, and if her small close-mouthed smile wasn't for him, it was near enough. "So if you're Samantha, I guess that means that you're gonna figure this out for us."

"Oh, he's _Samantha_, all right."

Dee glared at Dean for that, which heartened Sam somewhat. Dee was Dean, revised. If she was another Dean, then she was _good_—brave, foolhardy, but mostly just good. So her being here couldn't be wrong.

When they arrived at the fortune-teller's place, it wasn't there.

Dean let the car roll gently into a parking space across the street, and they all stared at the flower store that had replaced the neon sign. The poles holding the awning up were laced with rust, and the water stains on the sidewalk in front of the store, where bunches of roses and dyed carnations lolled in green plastic buckets, were etched years deep.

"Fuck," Dean summarized.

"Time for some research," Sam said, and Dean and Dee groaned on cue.

"I gotta get back to Samantha," Dee said as soon as Dean had started the ignition again.

He felt a pang for Dee's sister. If the fortune-teller had been as cryptic to Samantha as she'd been to Sam, then Samantha must be thinking that it was Trickster days all over again. She'd be feeling the blind panic Sam had felt when he'd shoveled that thin layer of dirt over Dean's cheap coffin.

Sam remembered those days too well. They'd buried Dean's body and most of Sam's sanity together. Bobby had muttered words about digging deeper and the risks of animals, but Sam had ignored him, obsessing instead about the fact that he'd only left a lighter in the coffin, and when Dean woke up he might need more than that to get out. He remembered thinking that he should have put in a spade, or at least a knife, and a bottle of water. It was all he'd been able to concentrate on for days, the list of things that Dean might use, because if he was thinking of that then he wasn't thinking about what Dean's body looked like.

So, yeah, Sam understood that his counterpart might be experiencing some trauma from the sudden absence of her sister. In her place, he'd have started laying traps for angels by now, on the theory that Castiel might be stepping up the training regime.

In fact, even if Dee was somehow the solution to their apocalyptic problem, Sam didn't see how bringing her here would help _her_ version of reality at all. Most of the eschatological literature suggested that there was a rough balance between the forces of Heaven and those of Hell. If Dean really was some sort of key player, then doubling Heaven's forces here meant leaving _there_ undefended, which didn't seem all that smart. Which in turn implied that the fortune-teller's motives hadn't been benign.

Every time he thought that their situation couldn't get worse, the universe smacked him in the face with evidence of his lack of imagination.

****

Bobby knew nothing of any use and had never heard of parallel worlds. He promised to hit his own books and get back to them. Sam's current mini-library was heavy on Armageddon and light on other topics, but there were plenty of relevant articles on arXiv, even though he could only understand about one in five of them.

Dee and Dean were still swapping stories, though they'd gotten more competitive as the talk turned to hunting. Sam thought about warning Dee that Dean was going to be a complete swinging dick about the topic, but neither of them were likely to appreciate his intervention. Sam did his best to tune them out. A year ago he would have told them to shut up or get out, but Dean was structurally incapable of extended silence and Sam was no longer capable of telling Dean to leave, so he was stuck with the point-counterpoint of implausible (yet mostly accurate, to the best of his knowledge) claims about various battles they'd been in.

"I can't believe Dad raised an asshole like you," Dee snapped, about fifteen sexist comments after Sam himself would have said something.

That statement and all that it implied was impossible for Sam to resist. He raised his head from his laptop. "He didn't."

That got him two death glares. Dee might possibly have thought that Sam was defending their father, but Dean plainly knew different. With both of them jiggling their legs as they sat across from each other, one bed per person, he could see how very alike they were.

"It's just facts," Dean said, turning his face away from Sam. "You're a girl. You can't beat a guy who knows what he's doing."

"Wanna bet?" Dee shot back, like she'd been waiting for the opening. "You, me, outside now? Loser shuts his fucking mouth?"

Dean snorted. "If only."

Which was a slam on Dean himself, but pointing that out would be futile.

"What's the hold-up?" Dee taunted. "Scared that a girl might kick your ass?"

Dean looked at Sam as if Sam might possibly support him in his idiocy. He wasn't thrilled about the thought of Dean and Dee leaving his presence, but if they just went outside it should be fine. He could certainly use the quiet. He thought he was beginning to get the hang of this Many Worlds thing, and he felt the vague outlines of an idea of how to translate the science into magical terms. If he could define it properly, he could manipulate it.

"Get him, Dee," he said.

Dean spluttered. Two minutes later, they were out the door. Sam had made them disarm, in case the cops came to break up the fight. The parking lot wasn't visible from the road, and the place was basically deserted in the middle of the day, but the last thing they needed was for the two of them to get pulled in for violating the gun laws.

Sam got in forty-five minutes of good research time before he started to wonder whether he ought to go check and make sure they hadn't killed each other. The thought of them both staring at him with amused contempt was enough to keep him in his seat, though not enough to keep his eyes off the little time display at the bottom right of his laptop.

Around the hour mark, something heavy slammed against the door. Sam bolted to his feet, drawing his gun. He heard fumbling with the lock—Dean's muffled curses, and the higher, less familiar sound of Dee complaining—and then the door sprang open, rebounding off the wall as they nearly fell inside.

Sam's jaw dropped.

Dee was wrapped around Dean, her legs tight around his waist and her arms gripping his shoulders. A line of blood trickled down Dean's temple, and a bruise was rising over most of what Sam could see of Dee's face, but they didn't seem to care; their mouths were locked together like they were vacuum sealed.

Dean had one hand under Dee's shirt, pressed hard between their bodies, and the other on her ass. The backs of his knees hit the bed nearest the door and he tumbled down. Dee freed herself from the kiss to toss her head back, her eyes closed and her pink mouth open like one of the girls in Dean's soft-core porn.

Sam blinked rapidly. This was—sick, depraved, insane.

Utterly predictable.

Dean had her shirt off now, and was working on her bra. Dean's lips were shiny, his eyes hot as he stared up at Dee's dangerous curves. Sam saw a flash of black, ink dark on her breast, the only mark that had survived Hell. She was kneeling on the bed, rutting against Dean, harsh scrape of denim on denim the loudest sound in the room as he curled up, his hands squeezing her breasts and his mouth smacking wet against her skin.

"Hey!" Sam protested. He knew he was the only rational Winchester, but _this_ was not how he wanted to be reminded of it.

"Get out or watch," Dean mumbled from where his face was pressed into her chest.

He looked away as he saw her start to tug Dean's T-shirt off, and moved to grab his laptop. This was crazy and disgusting and he had work to do. God, the noises they were making—

The grunts and groans were escalating as he fled. "Fucking boots," Dean said, sounding drunk. "Turn the fuck over." Sam closed the door, furious and relieved to be out of there, and headed to the far end of the walkway, where he could make sure nobody was approaching and still get the motel's wireless without having to hear.

****

Sam's laptop battery was nearly dead by the time his phone buzzed. He picked up, too mad to be the first to talk.

"When you get dinner, grab some beer. And some condoms."

"You're unbelievable," he snapped. "And there's most of a box—"

"Condoms, Sammy," Dean repeated smugly, which was an _obvious_ attempt to taunt him, as if Dean's refractory period were at all the problem here. He heard Dee's voice in the background. "And Diet Coke. In cans."

If he'd been anything like Dean, now would be the time to use the word 'pussy-whipped.' Sam inhaled and stuffed down the impulse. "You'd better have all your clothes on when I get back," he warned.

"You really know how to spoil a party," Dean chided.

See, the most annoying thing—_among_ the annoying things about this situation was that Dean would undoubtedly freak out if Sam made any sort of move on Dee, but he was still casting Sam as the prude.

Sam nodded to himself, shut the computer down, and headed towards the car.

He got Thai food, just because he could.

****

It wasn't even that she was also a Winchester, he decided. Technically, it was closer to masturbation than to anything else, and if Dean had magically been turned into a woman he would have gotten his new body naked in a minute or two, so experimentation was no surprise.

But Dee was a complication, not a one-night stand. She might be necessary to keep the last seals closed, or there might even be some way to trade her world for theirs. Sam wasn't a fan of that idea by any means, but he could only try to save one world at a time, and theirs had the virtue of familiarity. Anyway, some of the theories suggested that parallel realities collapsed all the time, which meant that using hers up wouldn't defy the natural order or anything like that.

Point was, Dee's wild-card status made her just about the stupidest choice of a fuck in Dean's extensive and intemperate history of hook-ups. Dean lied to girls with no hesitation and not a little glee, but underneath that was a definite tendency to ride to their rescue when they seemed endangered.

And also: Like called to like. Sam needed to ensure that Dean would jump the right way if it came time for their interests to diverge with Dee's. Before Dean went to Hell, it wouldn't have been a worry, but angels guarded Dean while he slept now, and that combined with Dee being a Winchester might just be enough to fuck things up completely.

****

After dinner, Sam returned to his reading. The room smelled like Panang Curry, overriding the scents of sweat and sex and Dean's salon shampoo that had greeted him on his return. While they'd shoved food into their mouths, Dean and Dee had been forced to listen to his summary of what he'd figured out thus far, which wasn't all that much. But as soon as the last noodle had been fought over and then slurped, they'd headed outside again, into the pleasant early evening, the sky a tender blue behind Dean where he was framed in the open door. Dean had promised no more fighting ("but you gotta see her roundhouse, it is _sweet_") and Sam couldn't make himself ask why they needed to get out so badly.

It didn't take much longer for Sam to run out of useful sources. He had a couple of ideas that would require Dee's presence. Also, he wanted Dean back inside.

He went to find them.

They were sitting together on the edge of the walkway, shoulders brushing as they looked out at the parking lot. Dean was talking, inaudible to Sam. By the time Sam was in range, he'd finished whatever he'd been saying. As Sam watched, Dee leaned over and elbowed Dean, gently. "I ended up doin' the same thing," she said, and there was a short pause before they both burst into laughter.

"Jesus, what an asshole," Dean said contemplatively.

Dee shrugged. "World's full of 'em." They raised their drinks—Dean's beer, Dee's can of Diet Coke—and swigged, decisive and relaxed at the same time.

There was a fiery, disconnected feeling in his stomach, so intense that he wasn't sure he could breathe through it.

She needed to _go back_, or something very bad was going to happen.

He cleared his throat. They swiveled towards him, perfectly in sync, each raising one eyebrow. "I think we can get a message to your sister," he said.

Dee smiled, sweet and open, like it had never even been in question.

****

The spell Sam had invented had no demon magic in it at all, which was what had delayed him so much. He'd been so convinced that his new knowledge would give him an extra edge that he'd ignored the basics. But then he'd thought about the fortune-teller, who'd had nothing demon-scented about her (plenty of other kinds of evil in the world, no need to go running for demons to explain each cruelty, after all).

What he had was a demented hybrid of scrying, veil-piercing, and witchery that took a ritual designed to reach into the Pit and turned it sideways. He'd spent a few weeks tinkering with the basic form as a way to rescue Dean, but he'd never tried it because he hadn't figured out how to use it to extract a person. Also, using the spell to contact Hell would have required a human sacrifice, because that was the coin Hell recognized. If he could have done more than look in, if he could have reached through and grabbed Dean, he would have made it happen—plenty of people were wastes of calories—but he couldn't do that just to see, without the capacity to help. Communication was what they needed now, though, and since he was making a different kind of long-distance call he no longer needed a full death.

He drew a great wheel on the floor, and gestured them both to step inside. Technically he didn't need Dean, but he had the feeling that Dean wouldn't react all that well to even the appearance of exclusion.

"I need some of your blood," he told Dee. Hair might have done it, but blood was the go-to substance, and there was no sense in starting weakfooted.

Dee shrugged out of her jacket and held out her arm without hesitation. Sam almost wanted to chasten her for being too trusting that this wasn't some sort of demonic ritual. He and Dean had stopped having the 'I'm worried about your dark path' fight these last few months, but only because each of them could recite the other's part by now.

Sam picked up his knife and took Dee's wrist. It was smaller than he'd expected somehow, warm against his fingers as he turned it for the right angle. There used to be a faint white scar on Dean's arm at just that point, from hunting that vampire.

"Scar's gone," Dee reminded him, following his stare. "Guess it's time to start again."

The vampire had been followed by worse: by Gordon. Gordon's blood had been thick on Sam's fingers, inhuman already, distorted by the alchemy of the supernatural. Sam's blood wasn't like that. Whatever taint Azazel had given him was powerful enough to protect him from demonic viruses, vampirism infections, and ghost fever, but it wasn't visible. Sam's blood looked just like Dean's.

Before Dee or Dean decided to prod him, Sam brought the knife down, right where the scar had been. The knife was so sharp that only years of training let him feel when it parted skin and when he needed to pull back. He guided Dee's arm over the chalked outline he'd drawn, making sure a drop hit every symbol. He could feel Dean's eyes on them both, watching and worrying.

Smoke began to curl up from the blood, white and thick. It smelled, for some reason, like lavender.

Like that, the floor disappeared, and was replaced by what seemed like a sheet of glass. Sam's stomach pitched and yawed. He was looking down, but down was up, so that he saw boots and beyond the boots, a popcorn-rough cheap motel ceiling: the same ceiling, he knew without checking, that was above them.

Possibly he should have attempted to cut his window in a vertical wall.

"Hey!" Dee yelled. "Sam?"

He glanced at her, but the owner of the boots jumped, twisted, and finally looked down, her eyes showing white all the way around. Sam saw dark, messy hair and not much else. "Dee!"

"'m okay," Dee said quickly.

Samantha dropped to her knees and her outstretched hands slammed into the barrier that separated them. Sam winced on her behalf as Dee knelt in response, pressing her palms up against Samantha's. "It's okay, Sam," she said. "I'm kinda stuck here right now, but it's not—I'm fine."

"What the fuck is going on?" Samantha demanded.

Dee opened her mouth, then turned to Sam. "Uh, this'd go faster Brainiac-to-Brainiac."

Sam obediently knelt, because that seemed likely to be a little less stomach-turning than standing while staring down into the reversed room, and started in on the Cliffs Notes version, examining Samantha as he talked. It was impossible to tell how tall she was from this angle, and her wavy hair probably looked better when it wasn't hanging down around her face as she knelt on the floor. She was wearing black jeans and a zipped gray sweatshirt that billowed around her. Her hazel eyes had a foxlike slant, narrowed in thought now that she wasn't panicking any more. If her nose was a little prominent, her moles were dead sexy. If he did say so himself.

He got Samantha up to speed and pointed her at the right references, but their problem was obvious: Sam's adapted scrying spell could allow communication, but not transport. And neither of them had any immediate ideas for changing that.

There was so much he'd have liked to have asked her, but there was no time for that. There was never any time.

They agreed to check in every twenty-four hours. Sam was impressed that Samantha thought she could go that long, but he didn't know how to say that without sounding both pathetic and dickish.

Dean cleared his throat. Sam looked over at him and Dean tilted his head: step back, let Dee talk.

Sam flushed and got to his feet, careful not to smudge the lines as he backed away to give them the illusion of privacy. He stood side by side with Dean as Dee made a couple of bad jokes about how stupid Samantha looked, and Samantha just stared at Dee, her hands still pressed against the floor. Sam could feel the ache in his own palms.

"We'll fix it," Dean said to him, as confident as if he were talking about a poltergeist hunt.

But when Sam broke the connection, he was careful not to watch Samantha's face.

****

Dee decided to get a room of her own next door, which Dean went to help her christen. With his headphones on, Sam couldn't hear much from them, and maybe he was imagining even the faint thumps.

Sam worked aimlessly on the protocol for opening a portal between realities. He hoped Samantha was doing better than he was. The difference between transmitting information and transmitting people was substantial. The fortune-teller, or whatever she was, had significant mojo.

Anyway, he was really just fucking around waiting for Dean. Dean never spent the night. Except that one time with Cassie. And maybe he thought that being next door counted as coming back.

No matter how dysfunctional you were, and no matter how likely the girl was to understand your damage, you didn't go knocking on her door to ask for your brother back. Sam was pretty clear on that concept.

He'd known he was alone in this. He just had thought, maybe, that Dean was too.

Near midnight, he heard Dee's door swing closed, and then—after a lot longer than it should have taken to walk six feet—Dean turned the key and came into their room. He looked fucked-out, his hair as mussed as it could manage for how short it was, his eyes half-closed and his lips swollen pink, his gait even more rolling than usual as he headed towards the nearest bed. He threw himself down on his stomach, pulling the pillow down so that he could mash his face into it.

At least someone's enjoying himself, Sam thought.

Dean didn't bother to ask for a status update. No matter what barriers had grown between them, he knew Sam would have told him if there'd been news.

"What were you talking about, in the parking lot earlier?" Sam asked. It came out sounding exactly not as casual as he meant it, and he compounded the error by flushing.

Dean picked his head up off of the pillow and looked at him curiously, but then shrugged, the movement pushing his body further down the bed. "Nothin', just comparing notes. You know, hunts, where we lived, what we did to get out of trouble."

"You're getting along better than I would have expected," he said, and there was still too much in his voice.

"Yeah, well," Dean said and ducked his head. "She understands me."

"I could understand you," he said involuntarily, feeling about twelve years old.

"Sammy—" Dean began, indulgent and dismissive all at once.

"I could _try_," he said, and Dean must have heard how close Sam was to the edge, because he stopped and stared.

After a moment, Dean nodded. "Yeah," he said. "That—yeah, okay."

Dean didn't offer anything else. Sam didn't push. But Sam shut down his computer, turned off the lights, and got into the other bed, taking the opportunity to listen to Dean's breathing switch to the slow rhythms of sleep. At least Dean was worn out enough to lie down voluntarily. He'd improved some in the past few months, but he still acted as if sleep hid an ambush.

Then Sam imagined Dee, curling herself around a pillow of her own in her empty, mussed bed. She'd probably put her boots back on with the rest of her clothes, just like Dean did now.

Sam would have gone to her if he thought it might have helped. But his presence didn't seem to do much for Dean, and he'd just be reminding her of what she didn't have at the moment.

****

The next morning, Dee collected Dean for a breakfast run. Sam forced himself out of bed and over to his computer. The morning news was bad: floods, locusts, a strange sickness killing cattle on three continents. He scrubbed at his forehead and did the usual searches. These days, he could sense a demon's presence, but only within a very short range. To find hunts, they still needed to collect data.

He found strange deaths and strange weather correlating, very near to their present location. Another demon making a run at them, most likely. At Dean, anyway. Among the things that Sam and Dean didn't talk about was Sam's immunity to Lilith's and Samhain's powers.

So far, Sam had only one hypothesis that fit the data, and it was a worrisome one. He was sure—about as sure as he was that the sun would come up tomorrow; which was to say, ninety percent sure—that he was one of the seven seals. According to Castiel via Dean, Lilith had chewed through fifty-six seals in total. The oldest text he'd found said that fifty-nine seals could be opened in any order, but seven could only be reached after the others were gone.

He didn't quite know what 'opening' would mean in his case, but he was guessing it wasn't from the fun side of the eschaton. Suckier still, he wasn't even invulnerable. Jake had been able to kill him just fine with an ordinary knife. He was just—demon-resistant, or something like. The only reassuring tidbit was that Lilith obviously hadn't understood his status either, or she wouldn't have been so surprised when she'd failed to kill him. But if she was sharp enough to open fifty-six seals, her ignorance wouldn't have lasted.

He'd made no further progress on the Many Worlds problem by the time Dean and Dee returned, though he had a message out to a guy at CalTech who might have some insights.

They rolled through the door like an entire pack of puppies, jostling each other and smiling, full of light and warmth and energy that made him feel like the older brother. He rubbed his hands across his eyes before throwing his shoulders back and stretching.

Dean's easy smile flickered into concern as he held out Sam's coffee. Sam twitched his lips, the best he could do, and took the cup with a grateful nod. The coffee was hot through the thin cardboard, painful to hold. Dean never bothered with the cupholders; Sam always did. He remembered what it had been like, four months of never endangering his palms, and managed a happier face.

Dee was perched on the side of Dean's bed, already deep into her egg and cheese biscuit, ignoring them or pretending to.

"Signs are that a major demon's near," he informed them.

"Signs," Dean repeated, swallowing a too-big mouthful.

He sighed. "I haven't been talking to Ruby, if that's what you mean."

That earned him a wounded look—two of them, big green eyes blinking slowly as if he'd just insulted Dad. What did they expect him to say? He spun the laptop around, showing them his map of unusual activity, not that either of them would be able to read it without an explanation. "Look, these are the signs, okay?"

"Guess we're going demon-hunting," Dean said. He was clearly a little relieved, itching to kill something familiar. Dee nodded and crumpled up her biscuit wrapper, leaving it in the center of Dean's bed.

"You didn't happen to be holding Ruby's knife when you came over?" Sam asked her.

She shook her head. Sam hadn't held out much hope of that. Dean had been making him carry the knife for a while now. Before Dean had showed off his super-exorcism trick, Sam had just thought it was a reminder not to use his demon powers.

Oh, he was being dumb, or in denial. Dee didn't need the knife either. In fact, it was probably safer to send the two of them out alone. Safer for the possessed victim, at least.

Dean swallowed the last of his breakfast (he'd had three biscuits to Dee's two, plus bacon) and tossed his wrapper so that it nudged up against Dee's, grinning at his own marksmanship. "So, let's go send this sonofabitch back to Hell."

****

There was a brief squabble over who was going to drive that nearly turned into another sparring and/or fucking session, resolved when Sam suggested that _he_ could do the honors and they both turned on him. Dee agreed that she'd drive on the way back, and Sam was relegated to the back seat, again.

"Oh, hey," Dean said as they pulled out of the motel lot, "tell Sammy how wrong he is: when you got back from Hell, you were totally a virgin again, right?"

"God!" Sam said, wincing and looking out the window, squinting against the morning sun.

Dee gave an aggrieved sigh. "Yeah, that sucked hardcore. Not like I could tell the dude—hey, I'm a miraculous lay, but there's just this one thing—no way." She twisted in her seat to chuckle at Sam's cringing. "Right, so afterwards, I'm thinking maybe I can get the condom off before he sees the blood, but you know some guys are real sensitive about the little man right after, and turns out he's one of 'em, and of course I like to see what I'm doing so the lights were on, and he looks down and he says—"

"Could I pay you to stop?" Sam asked, pitifully enough that they both started laughing, which at least had the virtue of changing the subject, if only to their _first_ first times, which turned out to be roughly contemporaneous. Sam tried to be progressive enough to be okay with that, but really he thought they both should have waited a lot longer. Sure, sex was beautiful and all that, but Dean used it like a competition, and also like junk food, never looking for a _connection_.

Sam guessed he'd made a connection now.

He hoped matters would improve when Dee started rummaging in the tape collection. But then they started performing an impromptu—and, worse luck, not at all bad—duet singing along with "Life Is a Lemon and I Want My Money Back." Sam sat and stared at his reflection in the window, trying not to sulk or seethe and bouncing between the two.

If _Samantha_ had been the one to cross over, he wouldn't—

He couldn't wish that Dee had been left all alone. At least Samantha was on the case now, and she wasn't distracted by Dean-squared.

"It's defective!" they chorused with glee. Sam shoved his hair out of his eyes and thought that this was better than being alone in the car. But not by as much as he wanted it to be.

****

They found a half-built shopping center, presumably abandoned due to current economic conditions, and chose one of the anchors at the ends as the right place to catch a demon. The floor was cold concrete, indifferently evened. Sam smelled dust and mouse droppings. The construction workers had left a bunch of takeout cups and bags crumpled in the corners, and the only color in the place was the spray-painted directions on the floor showing where all the pipes were supposed to go.

Sam borrowed a discarded ladder, took his purple chalk—Dean and Dee were too caught up in some discussion to make fun, fine—and started to draw the Devil's Trap. Making it big enough to cover most of the room took a long time, and he had to reposition the ladder a lot. He told himself that it was the uncomfortable vibration of chalk on ceiling tiles that made his fingers sting as he got closer to finishing the design. When he joined the last line, it felt like someone had shoved a spike through his skull, right above his left ear, and two drops of blood splashed down onto the top step of the ladder, blurring into the dirt there.

He wiped his nose quickly, checking to make sure neither Dean nor Dee had been watching, but they were busy snapping at each other. Sam could hear the exasperation in Dean's tone even though he couldn't make out the words.

"Hey," he called out, and they both whipped around to face him, guilty and a little relieved. "You'd better be ready with your part."

They folded their arms across their chests and pouted at him. But he could see that the rest of the spell prep had been completed.

He had to jump off the ladder, because the steps down went under the trap. He thought about how no one loved a traitor, not even those who used him.

They didn't have to wait long after triggering the spell, but it was one of the longest half hours Sam had ever spent. Dean and Dee had stopped fighting, though they refused to explain its content—"You gonna be the _judge_, Sam?"—and they paced two parallel lines across the scuffed floor, their pissed-off silences emanating from them like two clouds of ash.

Get Dean angry over something familiar, and when his mood improved he'd have forgotten whatever was between him and Dee. Sam had an evergreen topic for that purpose. "I still don't understand why the angels demand I give up using the powers. I need a better explanation than 'they're demonic' when I've seen them save lives, rescue people from possession. How can that be wrong?"

Dee looked over at Dean, raising an eyebrow dubiously. "You didn't make 'em tell you?"

"You _made_ Castiel tell you something?" Dean asked, equally incredulous. "What, you put out for him?"

She flipped him off. "Like you wouldn't. Nah, after Samhain my Sam said obviously we have some sorta leverage, and it shouldn't cost 'em anything to answer a basic question."

Sam didn't look at Dean. He preferred to feel stupid while staring at nothing in particular.

Dee cleared her throat. "Turns out it's one of those 'we're not all-knowing' things. He said they had a sorta sacred text about you, but light on the details." She closed her eyes and recited. "'The demon grapples with the human. If the demon strikes, the last seal will break.' The way they see it, each time you use the powers might be the wrong time."

Now, Sam checked for Dean's reaction, which was muted. Dee's story was bad, but not much worse than other things they knew already.

The angels had been proceeding as if this supposed struggle were internal. True, there was human and demon inside him, and he could see that as a battle for control of himself. But what if he was supposed to 'grapple' with someone else? Someone like Dean?

Sam was almost relieved when a figure slammed the door open. He felt the buzz of a demonic presence and prepared himself for battle. The demon was wearing the body of a teenaged boy. His face was spotty and twisted with fury, but it marched into the center of the room without hesitating. Sam really, really wished that Castiel or one of the many other angels listed in the books had bothered to write this spell down a couple of centuries back instead of waiting to unload it on Dean. Better late than never, he guessed.

There was a moment of uncertainty, where it wasn't clear who was going to start the exorcism, and then Dee nodded to Dean—your world, your turn—and Dean began.

"Why don't you use your Voice, Dean Winchester?" it taunted, turning to focus only on Dean. Its host had curly blond hair, so light that the pink of the boy's scalp showed through.

Sam clenched his jaw. His fingers ached with the need to raise his hand and squeeze. His head hurt like someone had slammed a door on it, and the ache only worsened as Dean continued to spew out Latin.

The demon's face screwed up in pain, but it advanced to the very edge of the Devil's Trap, as close to Dean as it could get. "You think you can get rid of me like that before I can kill this body? Talk fast, angelface." Dean faltered, looking over at Sam, and the demon brought its hands up, fingers jabbing at the boy's light blue eyes—it was going to blind its host.

"Dean!" Sam yelled, warning and permission.

"Depart," Dean said, the word rolling out of him like a wave from the ocean. His face was a painted icon's, stiff and beautiful and not of this world. Sam felt it hit him in the chest, pushing the air out of his lungs. Distantly, over the roar of pain falling on him like a hailstorm, he heard the demon's scream, higher than his own but with the same pitch.

When he came to, his head was cushioned on a warm body—Dean, he thought, then realized that Dean was larger. He blinked, his eyelashes sticking together as if they didn't want him to see, and looked up into Dee's worried face. He felt as if he'd been shoved into an iron maiden, spikes of agony through every limb. Last time hadn't been this bad, he didn't think. But at least he hadn't pissed himself.

"Dean's callin' an ambulance," Dee said, fast and rough, before he could formulate the question. "Kid'll probably be fine."

"How long?"

She shrugged. "Couple of minutes. You, uh." She pressed her lips together and a muscle twitched in her jaw. Sam was fascinated by it: so alike, and so different. Staring into those eyes, green with little flashes of brown like a forest in summer, was much nicer than thinking about his own problems. She was even petting his forehead. She bit her lip. "You bounced off the Devil's Trap when you fell."

Well, there went all his effort in disguising that particular revolting development. He nodded, and felt a trickle of blood down his neck. He hoped that it wasn't from his eyes.

"Demon blood," he reminded Dee. She didn't acknowledge that he'd spoken, except with a little quiver of her lips. But he needed to let them know. "That's new, the—problem with the Devil's Trap. Now that Lilith's close to the final seals, it's gonna get harder for me."

"What in—the fuck are you talking about?" Dee demanded, exasperation in her voice like Sam was just making up problems. Her hands were still gentle on him, warm and comforting. He wanted to close his eyes and curl into her, press his face into her neck and breathe her in.

Instead, Sam struggled to push himself up, and she shifted so that she could help him sit, despite the nuclear explosion that went off behind his temple. She kept her arm around his shoulder, kneeling behind him, even when he was mostly upright.

"What does Samantha think her role is in all this?" he asked, instead of answering.

Dee was silent as a newly torched grave behind him.

Yeah, that's what he'd thought. Dean always hated the theological stuff, the _rationales_, even when they didn't involve family. Sam had carried it on his own. Except that Dean now blasted demons with a word—make that a Word—so it was arguable that he had as much of a need to know as Sam.

"We should—"

"Sam!" Dean called. Sam managed to swivel and saw Dean, breathing hard, at the entrance. He looked Sam up and down, then jogged over to them, getting down on one knee so that he could cup Sam's jaw in one hand and examine him close up.

"I'm fine, Dean," he said patiently. Dean rolled his eyes. Sam would have liked him to do more, maybe yell, but apparently they were beyond that. "Let's get—"

Dean went flying backwards, like a fish hooked on a line. Sam's head snapped up and just as Dean crashed into the side wall, he saw the figure standing in the door.

"I'm sorry," the demon said, "am I interrupting?"

The fucking summoning spell. They hadn't counted on _two_, and Sam hadn't been paying attention, what with his head twanging like a guitar. This one was in a woman's body, mid-thirties, brunette and plump. Dean was twisting on the wall, his face screwed up as if he were trying to speak. Evidently this demon had given Dean some thought. Even if it wasn't working for Lilith, it was likely to kill him quickly.

Sam couldn't have exorcised it now even if he'd had the strength to raise his hand, not with the football game going on in his head. Behind him, he could feel Dee vibrating like an engine in neutral.

The demon strolled closer, smiling at them. "Now that we've clipped those wings, I think I might want to take my time with you two."

Sam pushed himself to his feet, and the demon allowed him to do it. He felt his lips twitch into a sneer. "True, you've got us in a bad position. But a situation like this one can change pretty fast. If I were you, I'd run."

The demon grinned, showing even white teeth. "Sam Winchester, you only wish you were me." It punched him with demon-enhanced strength, slamming him backwards into the wall so hard that he thought he'd cracked a rib. His head felt like it had been the ball in a World Cup match.

"And look," the demon continued when it saw that Sam wasn't quite unconscious, "you brought an appetizer." It examined Dee, who was in a fighting stance.

If she used Dean's power now, the extra damage really might kill Sam, and she had to know that. But it would save her, and Dean, and Sam might survive. He could only hope she thought that the demon was _definitely_ going to kill him.

"Dee—" he tried, and the demon punched him again, sending his head bouncing against the wall again—contre-coup, he thought muzzily. His vision grayed out as he slumped against the cold uneven wall. When he blinked through the black-and-white sparkles, the demon was pressing its host's body up against Dean's, whispering something that made Dean go even blanker and more furious. Its hands were invisible from Sam's line of sight, doing something between their bodies. Dean flinched, and his hands clenched, scrabbling against the wall, but the demon had his mouth held so firmly shut that only a faint sound, almost a whine, escaped.

_Please_, he thought at Dee, who cast a despairing look at him as if she'd heard.

She swallowed. "Depart," she said.

Sam flinched, reflexively.

Then he blinked.

The demon's eyebrows rose as it turned away from Dean to stare at her. "Are you _deficient_? That's for angels, little girl." It raised its hand towards her, casual as a restaurant patron waving for the check.

For the second time, nothing happened.

Sam couldn't see Dee's face, but he guessed it was as shocked as Dean's. Sam remembered himself and managed to twist against the wall enough to grab the killing knife, tossing it so that it headed hilt-first at Dee. Dee caught it without even looking, then darted forward as fast as anyone Sam had ever seen, swiping it across the demon's stomach.

There was the traditional flare of sick-orange light edging the wound, and the body collapsed, just Dean came unstuck from the wall like a zapped bug.

Dean strode over to the body, moving in a way that suggested he was hurting but functional, and knelt down to check it. He looked up and shook his head.

"Let's get out of here," Sam said, and nobody fought him.

****

"What the fuck was that?" Dee asked again once they were safe in their room, struggling into one of Dean's T-shirts to replace the shirt she'd ruined with the victim's blood. Sam recognized the habit of cursing a way through a problem, if not the timbre of the voice.

Sam took another drink of water, chasing the last of the pain pills he was going to allow himself. He'd taken enough to blunt the worst of it, but he needed to be able to think. "We need to find out if Castiel knows anything about Dee. Will he be in touch soon?"

"The demons weren't expecting that, why would he know?" Dee snapped.

"Different sources," Sam said, as mildly as he could. "He does have a line to the All-Knowing."

Dean put an awkward hand on Dee's shoulder. Dee shuddered, but didn't shove him away. Sam wouldn't have thought that Dee would be so put out by losing a power she—Dean—claimed to hate so much. Then again, failing in the middle of a battle like that had to have been frightening.

"I can summon him," Dean said slowly, which was another fun new fact. "But he gets pissed if I do it for no reason." The way he said it, he didn't want Castiel angry, which was unusual since Dean generally _lived_ to make steam come out the ears of non-Dad authority figures.

Sam frowned. "Don't mention parallel realities or anything like that. Ask him if Lilith sent Dee to, I don't know, tempt us."

"Us?" Dee repeated, her eyebrow raised, distracted from her anger.

Dean paused briefly, his mouth working on some undoubtedly awful quip, but then he shook his head. "And if he says he's got no clue?"

Dee snorted. "Tell him you're starting to believe that there's only one solution."

"What?" Sam demanded. He had a bad feeling about this.

Dean rubbed a hand through his hair, then over his mouth, then turned away. "He said stop you or the angels would. But he's bluffing, he can't touch you."

Dee nodded.

"How do you know he's bluffing?" Sam asked, feeling as if this was information he should have had beforehand.

"Because if he coulda done something, he woulda already—you scare the shit out of him and Uriel even when you're not using the powers," Dean said.

"But _why_ can't he act?" he insisted, knowing he sounded too much like the annoying little brother. "He's an _angel_."

"Because he's a fucking angel and you're a human!" Dee snarled, shoving herself in between them as she jabbed a finger in Sam's chest. Sam stepped back because if he didn't he was going to start swinging himself. "Because those are the rules, and God made 'em and right now God doesn't wanna change 'em!" Dee swiped her hand across her face and looked down as Dean nodded agreement. "Fuck if I know. Engines, they make sense. God? God didn't tell Job what the deal was, and He isn't stopping to explain Himself to a Winchester."

Sam had never stopped hoping that angels were good. Getting Dean out of Hell bought a lot of slack with him. But that didn't put them on the same side. It didn't mean he was going to lie down and get killed because the angels disagreed about how best to fight Lucifer. Yes, Sam was playing with fire. But Winchesters knew how to use fire.

"I'll talk to him," Dean said, unhappily. "But if he gets angry—"

"He's _already_ angry," Dee snapped.

"_More_ angry," Dean snarled right back. "I'm just sayin', poking at an angel without a plan is dumb even for us."

"There'll be a plan," Sam interrupted. They stared at him. He shook his head: he didn't have it together yet, but he could feel the pieces moving, shifting.

Dean blew out a breath. "Hope you know what you're doin', Sammy."

So did he.

****

Sam hadn't thought through the fact that Dean's communication with Castiel would leave him alone with Dee. Dean would normally have dealt with being cooped up together by throwing spitballs or something equally annoying. It wasn't the same with Dee, but she was at least as antsy, pacing around like a newly caged tiger. His headache faded into mere background discomfort, but he still had trouble concentrating.

He tried to work on a ritual to open the door between the worlds. He still had no idea what the fortune-teller had done. Bobby was trying to track her down, but their only contacts had been online and he wasn't hopeful.

The room smelled different with Dee in it. There was the usual faint detergent scent of every halfway decent motel—some had a hint of powdery orange, others were floral, but you could always tell that not all the chemicals had come out in the wash. Over the past few years, he'd gotten used to it again, along with the lean warm smell of Dean, running from Irish Spring-clean to hunt-rank but always fundamentally Dean. Dee smelled like—well, Dean was all over her, of course, but under that was something sweet, like sugar cookies.

Sam opened his eyes and hoped that he hadn't been _sniffing_. The blank page on his screen regarded him chidingly.

Then it was obscured by Dee, who was—fuck, pouring herself into his lap, straddling him and leaning back, her hands braced against his shoulders. "Dee!" he squeaked, lurching backwards in his chair.

She smiled at him, her eyes grass-green and her lips shining pink where she'd just licked them. "C'mon, you haven't done a damn thing in twenty minutes. I figure you could use a break to clear your head. _I_ always think better after a good lay."

"I can't even figure out where to start on how wrong this is!" He was pleased that his voice didn't break. Dee was warm against his legs, soft in just the right ways, pressing him down into the cheap wood. "Even aside—you—Dean," he stumbled to a halt, working on a way to explain the completely obvious to the utterly oblivious.

"We aren't dating, Sammy." She slid forward, her jeans rubbing roughly against his hips.

This was exactly like trying to talk to Dean about—which was _why_ it was such a bad—He'd spent four months chasing the little death, then half a year celibate as a monk, and she smelled so—

"You have a better body than Dean," Dee said, which shouldn't have made Sam thrust up against her ass. "I mean, he's a ten, don't get me wrong, but you're just like Samantha, hiding what she's got even though her tits are better than mine."

Involuntarily, Sam's eyes dropped to Dee's chest, her nipples outlined even through her bra and the thin cotton of Dean's undershirt. "Honestly," he said, clenching his fists on the denim of his jeans to keep his hands from deciding for him, "I find that very hard to believe."

Dee wriggled happily. "Aren't you sweet?" Cooing it like he was a kid, like she wasn't giving him a _lap dance_.

And that was it, the end of his self-control. He stood, grabbing her waist, and practically threw her onto the bed. Dee laughed, her head back, as he tore at her jeans and ripped her panties down until they hung off one of her ankles. Seconds later, he buried his face between her legs.

She tasted sweeter and darker than molasses—nectar and ambrosia, he thought wildly, understanding now why Dean had been acting so drugged. He could do this for _hours_, and he wanted to tell her so, only that would require taking his tongue off of her, so instead he just hummed as he suckled, wet curls of hair scraping against his face. She jolted up and he wrapped his hands around her hips to keep her in place. "Fuck, yeah, baby," she said, and kept on like that, words spilling out of her like she was doing phone sex.

She fisted a hand in his hair, hard enough to bring tears to his eyes, as he brought a hand up to slide two fingers into her, curling into her slickness.

When she arched up and tightened around him, he was tempted to keep going, but his hardon argued strenuously against that. "Strip," he ordered, and pulled back to shed his own clothes. It was hard to remember what he was doing while she was obeying, especially when she took off her bra, naked except for her amulet. He could see the full circle-and-pentagram of her tattoo, sloping across her breast.

Dean had left a box of condoms on the table between the beds, and Sam grabbed one. He paused above her, looking down at her naked body, breasts and pussy spread out for him, and groaned without meaning to. She giggled, which made her breasts bounce even more enticingly, and he put his hands on her thighs, still wet from his spit and her own arousal, pushing them apart.

He had to close his eyes when he slid into her. She gasped and brought her legs up to wrap around his hips. She was tight hot slick around him, lunging up and sticking her tongue in his mouth, sucking her own taste out of him, salt-sweet and musky, like something he'd always wanted but never quite known.

He put his hands on her shoulders, shoving her back into the mattress, fucking her so hard he expected a protest. She just surged up, meeting each thrust with a wriggling twist. He felt the grind of her amulet against his chest, digging bruises into his skin. With each girl he'd fucked during that endless four months, he'd twisted the thong around before they started so that the amulet hit his back and didn't touch her, didn't get tarnished with a stranger's sweat. This amulet wasn't his to protect. It was right where it belonged.

He pulled back to see it: the golden-brown bull's head bouncing between her breasts, a red mark on her sternum where their fucking had shoved it into her flesh. He looked further down, to where his cock was sliding in and out of her, thick and red beneath the cloudy yellow of the condom. She moved a hand down, fingering herself while he watched, and he bit his lip and sped up his thrusts.

She had the same handprint on her shoulder, looking even bigger given her smaller size. His hand fit right over the marks, hiding them away, the red raised flesh hot under his skin like it was still feeling the flames.

Dee moaned when he dug his fingers in, throwing her head back in a gesture too pornographic to be uncalculated, but the clench around him was perfectly real. Her hair spread on the pillow around her, a few shades more golden than the amulet.

"He can't have you," he told her. "He can't have you."

She nodded, eyes closed, as if he'd just said something profound. Then speech was beyond him. He grabbed her and held on, fingers slipping over her sweat-slick skin, while she ran her hands over his shoulders, his back, his arms. She hitched her legs up, around his waist, drawing him deeper. The noises they made were ridiculous, wet and thick and loud. Her skin was salty, almost sour. It didn't taste any different on her shoulder, even though he could feel the scar-thickness of the brand, smooth and hot under his tongue, rough edges where it merged with her untouched skin. She moaned when he tested it with his teeth, losing her rhythm as he bit down and pounded into her.

She screamed when she came this time, her fingernails scraping down his back, pushing him over the edge and into pleasure as intense as a lightning strike in a thunderstorm.

The last time he'd felt this good, he'd just pushed a demon back into Hell.

Sam forced the thought aside and made himself reach down, grabbing the condom as he pulled back and off. He was still mostly hard, sensitive enough that the feeling of his own fingers made him gasp. Dee's eyes followed his hands as he pulled the rubber off and cast it aside. When he collapsed on his back, she rolled until she was snugged up against him, one leg thrown over his and her breasts soft against his side.

"How long until you can go again?" she asked, following the hot words in his ear with a hotter swipe of tongue. He twitched, and even though he couldn't see her face he could tell she was as smug as Dean when he'd just emptied a clip and hit the bullseye with every shot.

"Sooner if you don't start comparing," he warned her.

She smiled into his shoulder. "Are you _sure_ about that?"

So yeah, this had been an All-Star Bad Idea. He pressed his lips tight and chalked up any other reaction to aftershocks.

Dee's right hand wandered idly over his chest, stroking over his collarbones, circling his nipples briefly, lingering over the scattering of moles on his side. Her thumb rubbed over his abs, like he was some weapon she was thinking of buying.

He was not ready for her to push herself down the bed and put her face up against his half-mast cock, bracing her hands to either side of his hips as she breathed in and out, damp against his skin. Her hair covered her face and tickled his thighs. "Fuck," he moaned, and put his hands on her shoulders, intending to pull her away. But then she opened her mouth and started licking the head, cleaning him off, moving down the shaft in slow teasing circles.

"Yeah," she mumbled, right up against his dick, and then took him in her mouth for real, halfway in one quick swallow. His fingers tightened on her, hard enough that he felt her shoulderbones, but she only opened her mouth further, her tongue fluttering against him.

"Ohfuck," he said, and that was about as coherent as he got for the next however many minutes.

She didn't let him come in her mouth—he had a moment of black rage, wondering if—anyway, she pulled off and rolled another condom on, quick as reloading a shotgun, then climbed on top, using the position to rock against him like he was just there for her convenience, her eyes closed and her head thrown back and her breasts just begging for his hands.

He wrapped one arm around her waist and sat up, dragging her to her knees; it wasn't as deep but the angle was better, allowing him to press against her, his other hand hard between her shoulderblades to keep their bodies locked together. She hooked her chin over his shoulder and moved up and down like she could hear a metronome.

Sam didn't hear the door open.

He did hear it close.

He pulled away from Dee's neck and looked up. Dean was standing a couple of feet inside, his mouth open and his eyes comically wide.

Dee stilled, so suddenly that Sam nearly screamed, and turned her head. At this angle, Sam couldn't interpret her expression, but then she smiled and raised an eyebrow. "Well?" she asked, then pushed Sam down so that he was flat on his back again, unable to see what Dean was doing.

There was a soft, collapsing sound—Dean's jacket hitting the floor, Sam realized. Dee squeaked as Sam thrust up uncontrollably, then moaned her way through what Sam was pretty sure was an exaggerated, albeit real, orgasm.

The bed whined when Dean got on, but Sam still couldn't see him. Sam felt like his body weighed a thousand tons, unable to move even a fraction. Dee made a soft, pleased sound, and her knees pressed more closely into Sam's hips, forced there by Dean. Dean's heels bumped against Sam's calves as he shifted around, and Sam shivered in reaction. Sam closed his eyes, but he could imagine it: Dean up on his knees, pulling Dee back against his chest.

Dee twitched and slipped backwards, pulling half off Sam. He blinked up at her, sweat stinging his eyes. Her face was twisted in concentration as she panted, just out of time with Dean, who had his arm tight just under her breasts. Sam could see the veins standing out as he held her in place. "Ah!" she yelped, bringing one hand back to brace against Dean's thigh as she curled down, her hair falling over her eyes.

Then Dean pushed forward, and Dee slid back down, gasping. Sam's hips pulsed up. Dean was practically _sitting_ on his upper thighs, not resting his weight there but nonetheless impossible to ignore. Dean had his face pressed into Dee's neck, mouthing over the tendons standing out as she tilted back, her skin shining where he'd left his mark. Dean's eyes were closed, lashes dark against his cheeks, as focused as if he were reloading his gun by touch.

Sam was—they were—could he _tell_, if he moved right? She was tighter than before around him, unbelievable. The smell was different, too, darker under the chemical tang of lubricant.

"Suck her tit for me," Dean instructed, his voice strained and deeper than usual. "Make it nice and wet."

And no fucking way was Sam taking _orders_ from Dean, except that it was a really good idea, so Sam pulled his head and shoulders off of the bed, levering himself up to take her right nipple into his mouth. Dee made a pleased sound and Sam opened his mouth further, sucking in as much of her breast as he could. She tasted like sweat and honey. He braced himself on his elbow and brought his free hand up to squeeze her other breast, where his fingers collided with Dean's. But Dean pulled away quickly, his hand running down Dee's belly to settle between her legs, fingering her so that his knuckles brushed against the top of Sam's groin every time Sam thrust up.

Pretty soon Sam couldn't keep it all coordinated and fell back, still holding Dee's breast because that felt too good to stop. Dean brought his hand back up, rubbing shiny fingers around Dee's spit-wet nipple, sliding his other hand around from where it had been resting on her hip to take over working her clit. His ring caught flashes of light as his fingers moved on her breast.

"C'mon, Sam," Dee urged. "Lemme see." She put her hand over his tattoo—she was too small to hide the whole thing, edges of black peeking around her fingers—and pushed down. His pulse lurched, like a wasps' nest bursting open inside him.

He came so hard that he didn't know what happened next.

At one point, he opened his eyes a fraction and saw Dean's hand rubbing over Dee's shoulder, inches from his face. The bed was warm and shaking just a little as they moved in it.

Sleep was the better part of valor, he decided.

****

He woke with a gasp, bursting through his own skin like dough rising in some infernal oven. Another seal had broken, out in the world, and power pulsed through him with such force that it almost felt like excitement.

Fifty-seven.

Stuffing his face back into the pillow, he concentrated on calming his breathing. Someone had put a sheet over him while he was out. He turned his head carefully, checking through the screen of his bangs to see if either of them had been watching.

Dee had her hair wrapped in a towel and had thrown on yet another of Dean's shirts, along with her jeans. She was cleaning some of the guns. Dean was sitting in front of Sam's computer, frowning at something while he chewed on a pen. A pile of styrofoam containers near his elbow suggested that Dean had combined angel consultation with a lunch run, which was almost ridiculous enough to make Sam smile despite everything.

Flush with the shock of the seal breaking, Sam wanted something to kill, but he'd settle for a situation report. He grabbed for his boxers and jeans, puddled exactly where he'd dropped them beside the bed, and jumped into them.

Dean looked up, his face a near-blank, worry lurking underneath it. Same as ever, these days. "Hey."

"How's Castiel?"

He didn't miss, but couldn't interpret, the glance Dean exchanged with Dee. "Doesn't know a damn thing."

"That's good," Sam said.

"It is?" Dean asked.

"I think I can see how this is gonna work for us," he told them. "But here's the part you're not gonna like: I need to talk to Ruby—"

He stopped because they were both shaking their heads, each "No!" exactly as loud as the other, both standing and moving towards him as if the problem was that he simply wasn't _close_ enough to accept their judgment.

"Ruby doesn't like whatever Castiel has planned, and she also doesn't want Lucifer walking free, so she's our best bet to cross-check, make sure that this—Dee being here and not where she should be—isn't one of Lilith's schemes."

"And what if it's not?" Dean asked. "Let's pretend you can trust her and she tells you she doesn't know what's up. What then?"

"Give me a little more time, Dean." He didn't want to say anything before he knew whether it was worth trying. Neither of them needed any more ripped-away chances for salvation.

Dean threw up his hands and turned away.

"I'm telling you, I need to see her. I'm _telling_ you."

Dean looked over at Dee. Years ago, during his one uncomfortable visit with Jess's parents, he'd watched her mom and dad have an entire conversation about him with just their expressions. This was like that, except much more painful. He could live with Dean not trusting him. He knew so because he had survived this far. He didn't think he could live with being replaced.

"When you get back, you'd better have a plan," Dean said at last, his eyes still locked with Dee's.

Sam tossed on his shirt and began looking for his boots. He wasn't going to give them time to rethink.

As he started the car, he glanced over at the window of their room and saw Dean and Dee, blurry through the glass. He couldn't tell whether they were looking at him, or at each other.

****

The newspaper boxes outside the diner had ominous headlines: TROOPS MASSING IN CHINA. FOOD RIOTS SPREAD. PENINSULA EVACUATED, THOUSANDS DEAD. Even if they stopped the opening of the seventh seal, Sam wondered if the world was too far gone to be saved.

He could only do his part. Or not do his part, as the case might be.

He kept his head down and ordered a burger and a side of fries—Dean's meal, the one he'd eaten regularly while Dean had been dead, never tasting a bite. He'd mostly stopped since Dean's return, but the order came out automatically, maybe because he was distracted.

"So, Dean's taken up with another slutbomb," Ruby said by way of introduction, sliding into the bench across from him.

Sam looked up from his burger and suppressed his half-hearted objection. "Is she a player?" It was good not to have to feign his deep uncertainty.

Ruby shrugged, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. "She's nothing, except that you really don't want your brother splitting his loyalties right now. A change in the pattern from one-night stands is not in our favor."

"We're getting along fine," Sam reassured her, trying not to show his renewed hope.

Ruby snorted, then grabbed his plate of fries. "I don't care if you have to get down on your knees and suck his cock, you'd better keep him on your side for when this thing goes down." She stopped, a french fry halfway to her mouth, and examined him, tilting her head up. "Sam? Sam, are you—you're _fucking_ her! Does big brother _know_?"

Sam nodded, keeping his lips together.

"And he's okay with that? Because if you're going to lose us the apocalypse in some kind of dick-measuring competition—"

Sam shook his head. "I don't—I think it will help. I don't _know_," he admitted, which was more than he'd meant to say.

Ruby pursed her lips. "Well, I have to admit, a tawdry threesome is more our side than theirs, though given how much Dean's already been forgiven I'm not sure it matters. But yeah, if the family that plays together stays together, then you go ahead and rock her world. Just keep your eyes on the prize."

What does that even mean? Sam wondered.

The important thing was that Ruby didn't see anything special about Dee, any more than the other demons had. And while he knew she'd happily weave a tapestry out of his intestines if it would serve her own interests better than teaching him how to use his powers, he thought she was sincere in her desire to keep the world turning. She was the likeliest one to admit it if she saw what Dee was.

"Hey," she said, waving her hand in front of his eyes, which had dipped down to the table. He raised his head, but the suddenness of the motion set every sore muscle to singing out its agonies and he didn't suppress a wince.

"Oh, for—why haven't you healed yourself?" she demanded.

He glared at her through his bangs. "I don't think we covered that." They'd been too busy working on exorcism.

"How do you think we keep the meatsuits alive past their expiration dates?"

He hadn't. Ruby sighed and grabbed his hand, the way she'd done when she was first teaching him how to drive out a demon. The old connection between them zinged open, and he scrambled to lock his defenses down. If she saw anything she shouldn't—but she was pushing into him, not pulling, an uncomfortable fullness like choking down mouthful after mouthful of near-spoiled food. The knowledge curled in his belly, greasy and uneven but useful all the same.

Her hand was so cold in his. He pushed the concern for her borrowed body away and focused on what she'd shown him. Swollen and leaking blood vessels wanted to heal themselves, lacked only time and energy. He could provide that, or something alien in him could, and right now he needed the extra edge.

When Sam opened his eyes again, the headache was gone. Ruby was finishing the last of his burger. Despite all the work he'd just done, Sam felt no hunger, just an impulse to grab her and choke her until even demon healing wouldn't work on her.

It occurred to him that perhaps demons got energy from something other than food.

"So why'd you get over your allergy to me all of a sudden?" she asked. She was looking down, but he could tell from the set of her shoulders that she was angry.

Sam shook his head. "Castiel threatened my life if I kept on practicing. So your lessons were kind of irrelevant. Whatever I do in the endgame, I do from a cold start."

She raised her head, black-eyed. "That wasn't an answer, Samuel."

Too smart. Sam listened to the small sounds of other people chatting around them, forks clinking, glasses clonking against formica tables. He kept his body as tense as Ruby would expect it to be. "Two questions. First, like you said, Dean's new girl's an unexpected variable. It had me worried, and I don't trust Dean to give me a straight answer. But if you don't know anything about her, then I figure she's Dean's last hurrah. Like soldiers going off for war, you know."

Ruby let her eyes flicker back to her host's, dark and serious. "I know," she said, almost wistful. Sam wondered what she'd have done if he'd made a pass at her, either during the months without Dean or in the few weeks after. He pushed his plate away, no longer hungry.

"Second, Dean's—his ability, it hurts me even when I'm not doing anything. If there's no way to protect me from it, then you and I might as well both just run."

Ruby nodded thoughtfully. "I've got an idea about that. Give me a day or so." He watched her throat, how it moved with her breath, how he could see veins sketched just below her pale skin. He wondered whether her host still lived.

"I'll be in touch soon," he promised, and got out. He stuck her with the check.

****

Halfway back to the motel, the phone rang. "We got a message from a bunch of demons," Dean said grimly. "Come to where they say or they'll kill everyone at the high school. It's game night, Sam. I saw the signs when we were drivin' earlier."

Dean had to know he couldn't sacrifice himself for a town full of people. Not even a state full of them. Dean was a keystone, on this Sam and Heaven agreed.

"You know what they'll do to you," he said, hopeless. The cage from last time would be there now. Lilith's demons meant to take Dean apart slowly. Just like Heaven was doing, he thought, only with more blood.

"I need you at that high school," Dean told him. "So I'll know those kids're safe." Dee couldn't take out a bunch of demons, not with only Ruby's knife and no backup nor time to prepare the location. Sam was the logical and inevitable choice. And Dean was tacitly acknowledging that Sam's powers were the lesser evil. It was what he'd wanted for months, only edged with disaster.

Sam swallowed. "Where is it?"

Dean rattled the address off, then paused. "And when you're done there, come for us." Sam had to close his eyes when Dean gave him the second address. Dean didn't express any doubt that Sam would go save a bunch of clueless teenagers first.

Lilith had the right idea: if she managed to take Dean out, he'd race her to end the world, because a Heaven that wouldn't save Dean didn't deserve any of its plans to come to fruition.

****

Game night meant that he couldn't find parking, so he slung the Impala into a loading dock. Pocketing the keys made him wonder whether Dean had actually _taken a cab_ to go get tortured by a bunch of demons. He broke into the high school through the nearby door. That put him in an area near the cafeteria, gray-walled and smelling of oranges and fryer grease.

He pushed open a set of double doors and entered the student side. Big place, like half the schools he'd attended, hand-drawn posters on the walls advertising college counseling and suicide prevention and the prom committee. Rough-painted arrows over the yellow metal lockers, pointing to different areas of the school: vocational, arts, sciences.

Crowd noise penetrated through the empty halls, echoing off the industrial-block walls and the infinite rows of lockers, dented here and there where some football player had hammered some ninety-pound-weakling. He followed the sounds, like searching out the source of a fire in the middle of a forest, until he was close enough that he could feel the vibrations under his feet. Warm golden light spilled through the windows in the heavy doors that led to the gym.

He sent his senses out, little tendrils of thought creeping softly through the walls and over the floors, checking for any likeness. Five, six—eight, he counted, then checked again to be sure. Six of them among the bleachers, probably armed and ready to create bloody chaos at the right signal, and two of them deeper in the building, one on either side of the gym. Sam was guessing that they were blocking the exits.

The bleachers shook with feet pounding, families and friends yelling their support. Pompoms flashed as cheerleaders tumbled and jumped, leading a cheer that combined insult with pep. The whole gym seemed to pulse in and out, like a heartbeat.

Sam was bitterly grateful to Lilith for having made it so far as he gathered his powers, which were surging like a pack of wolves even though he'd ignored them for so long. He was so out of practice that he knew he'd have less pain actually sticking his head into a blender. No way around it, though, so he closed his eyes and concentrated.

The command exploded out of him like a grenade going off, sending a psychic blast wave through the school. His vision rippled like reality was a sheet being shaken out. The noise faltered, as if the humans had all sensed the presence of the uncanny; as if they'd all suddenly been standing in Sam's shoes, alone in the hallway dripping with unwanted power and death.

He felt the demons fall apart, popping like ink-filled bubbles as their hosts hiccupped them up.

And then the backlash hit him. He was a snake too large for its skin, a balloon overfilled and exploding, trapped like Gulliver in a net held by thousands of Lilliputians too small to see. He was instantly drenched in sweat, shivering before the heat died down, staggering sideways until he clanged against a locker, then sliding down into a heap against the cool, dirty floor.

Sam's head felt like it had been scraped clean on the inside with a sharp stick. The feeling was not unlike being badly hurt and heavily dosed with oxycodone. There was pain somewhere, and the somewhere was him, but he was light enough to float away so it didn't actually matter.

This wasn't the familiar brain-crushing headache of using the powers. If anything, he was brimful with power, gorged with it.

The fifty-eighth seal had broken.

He flashed back to the positions the demons had been in. They'd formed the outline of an eye; it must have been a mystical symbol. The simultaneous exorcism, like a mass human sacrifice, had triggered some mechanism, probably one Lilith couldn't have operated on her own.

Tonight was a trap for him as much as for Dean. One more seal and it was open season on him, not to mention probably mere days before the Morningstar brought Hell to earth.

The roar of the game resumed, as if someone had just muted it for a second to answer the phone but had thought better of it. Sam couldn't stand here and worry. He couldn't even stop to check whether the hosts needed medical attention.

****

One thing about driving the Impala alone for four months: he could make it do tricks he'd previously thought reserved only to Dean. He was fifteen minutes away from the second trap. He made it in nine. The place was an out-of-business Hollywood Video location, the paint around the missing logo making its identity clear by absence. Stuck in the middle of an empty parking lot, most of the lights broken or burnt out, windows covered with opaque sheeting, it was a perfect stage for torture and pyrotechnics. Stood to reason that an economic collapse would be good for demons, but he'd never thought of the matter in terms of real estate before. Sam left the car in the darkness of the outer edges of the lot and headed to the back, where there was an employee entrance.

So Lilith had used patterns too large for him to see. Two could play at that game. He closed his eyes, imagining the ground beneath his feet. In the middle of a built-up area, it was shot through with metal of all kinds. All he had to do was wrench and crumple, forming a pentagram in a circle around the building, twisting pipes and cables out of true until they were proper sigils. He was probably cutting power to the surrounding six blocks, but that was just tough.

He only remembered to leave himself a space to step inside at the last second. Crossing felt like being stabbed in the chest, but it was over quickly. Closing the final line felt like chewing tinfoil. Pain zinged through his jaw and ears, stabbing like needles. Once the trap was closed, the air seemed to dry out, and his ears popped when he swallowed. Moving was like walking through cotton, not difficult but subtly wrong.

When he reached out with his inner eye again, he quickly found a knot of eight demons. They didn't have anyone on guard, which was either overconfidence on their part or on his. He concentrated, readying himself to squeeze them out of their hosts—

Nothing; his powers bounced off of them like they were sealed in plastic eggs. Slick, featureless—he could sense them, but they were unreachable.

He remembered the binding rune Meg had used to fasten herself to his body. Unlike the ones at the high school, these demons didn't want to be exorcised. They wanted to have time to work.

He'd have to go inside the building.

The back door was already open, which didn't reassure him. He was in a hallway, cool and dusty with disuse. The strongest smell was the fake butter of microwave popcorn. Faint light spilled from the other end, where the main part of the store had been.

Experimentally, Sam reached out with his mind for a discarded DVD case propped up against the wall. It floated obediently into his hand. He hadn't been sure the powers would work inside the Devil's Trap. On balance, bad news, because that meant he was facing the full attentions of eight demons.

The Impala had provided him with a shotgun and two handguns. He figured headshots would be his best bet to take the hosts out of contention, at least for long enough to get Dean out.

A soft noise made him turn: Dee, already putting Ruby's knife back in its sheath. Her eyes gleamed in the near-darkness, wide and worried. With hand signals, they agreed that they'd continue forward, to the open space of the store. That was not going to be the best place for knifework. There was too much opportunity for targets to retreat, and they couldn't afford to lose their only sure killing weapon with a throw.

Plastic sheeting was heaped around the doorway at the end of the hall, and they moved even more carefully to minimize noise, crouching down and scouting around the edges.

Sam had been wrong about the cage.

This time, the demons had Dean bound to a good old-fashioned cross, made out of what looked like stray pieces of lumber. He wasn't nailed, which made Sam sag for a moment in horrified relief, but his wrists and ankles were bound with wire, already dripping with blood where his skin had broken open under his own weight. They'd cut his shirt off and sliced across his stomach. A rag stuffed into his mouth forced his jaws apart, held there by the gag cutting deep into his skin.

One of the demons, wearing a redheaded young man in a baseball jersey, bent in front of Dean and licked a runnel of blood, following it down Dean's skin until he reached the sodden waist of Dean's jeans. Dean's muscles fluttered with revulsion, but he didn't struggle.

Sam raised the shotgun, but Dee's hand clamped around his forearm. When the red haze cleared a little, he realized that he could see only six demons. Exposing their position now, without knowing the location of the other two, could be a fatal mistake, and he quickly discovered that he'd lost his ability to sense them. It didn't matter whether that was exhaustion or some side effect of the Devil's Trap, but he sincerely regretted the lack of any texts on demonic powers written from the demon's perspective.

No time for brooding, Dee was saying with her eyes. At least he still had the ability to move objects. Which made him think: he looked up at the ceiling, which unfortunately was that soft spongy tile that fell apart at the first touch. The ceiling would have been better, less noticeable, but he could make do with the floor as well.

Slowly at first, and then faster as he got the hang of it, he cracked the concrete underneath the cheap dirt-brown carpet, creating a small Devil's Trap right around Dean. Once the redheaded demon stepped back just a bit, he'd close it and then Dean would be safe.

Except that the demon refused to cooperate, twining itself around Dean, its hands curling around him in a parody of desire. It stuck two fingers into the largest slice on Dean's stomach, then called out, "You've got to try this," while Dean clenched his jaw and turned his face away.

Fuck it, Sam thought, and finished the circle. He could save that one for last.

He nodded at Dee and they jumped out, Sam firing as she rabbited towards the nearest demon. She was fast as an electric shock, and the first flare of demon-death was almost instantaneous. Another demon turned and began to raise its hand to her, and Sam blasted it back with the shotgun, then switched to his first handgun.

As it turned out, a headshot was insufficient, but head, knee and gut together were more persuasive.

"Stop!"

The yell came from the redheaded demon. Sam counted bodies—six down, which meant one more still at large. The demon with Dean had a knife up to Dean's throat, and it hadn't been careful about placement. Blood was already drooling down Dean's chest.

"What's your endgame?" Sam asked, stepping forward with the gun trained at its forehead. Dee would have to watch for the remaining demon. "You know you're stuck. Throw the knife away and I'll let you go."

"Throw the gun away and I'll let him live," the demon countered.

"You know if I exorcise you it's permanent death, right?"

There was a thud, behind and to the right of Sam. Dean's eyes were too unfocused for his lack of reaction to be entirely reassuring. Sam chose to believe that Dee was the source of the noise, not the victim.

The demon blinked at Sam. Sam couldn't tell much about the host, other that he was in his mid-thirties. "You mean it?" it asked.  
Which was very far from what Sam had been expecting. But it stood to reason that the demons who fought so hard to escape Hell might not want to go back. Even Sam was more and more certain every day that he wanted death to be the real end, and _he_ was at least hoping not to qualify for Hellfire.

"Yeah," he said, and it came out soft. He didn't let the gun waver. Dean was as still as a carved Jesus, breathing so shallowly that the knife didn't draw any more blood.

"Your word," the demon said.

"I swear by all powers, above and below," Sam said evenly. "Step out of the Devil's Trap and I'll give you what you want."

The demon thought for a moment, then nodded and tossed its knife away, lost in the darkness. Sam sent a ripple of force up through the floor behind them, bursting through the pentagram, and the demon inhaled.

Then it kicked out, and Sam went tumbling backwards, slamming full-length onto the floor. He saw blackness lashed with white, neurons firing randomly at the shock. "Sorry," it said, "but Lilith's given me a better deal."

He couldn't see—it could be killing Dean right then—he grabbed at every scrap of power left to him and shoved back as he pushed up onto his elbows.

Dean twitched on the cross and gave a terrible gurgle—alive, he was alive—and Sam struggled to his feet. By the time he had his balance, the demon was wriggling feebly on the floor, Dee straddling it with the knife digging into its shirt right above its heart.

Sam stalked over and looked down.

"Please," it said. "Don't send me back."

Dee didn't look away from the demon, but she flinched. All he could see of her face was the curve of her cheek and the fall of her hair. Her body was as stiff as a pile of knives. He didn't check for how Dean was reacting.

"It's your lucky night," he said, and raised his hand, needing the physical focus.

As soon as the man started choking out demon goo, Dee was up and off him, running to hack at Dean's bonds with Ruby's knife, a serious waste of edge but not one Sam was going to complain about. Dean fought off her help before his ankles were free, and Sam had to come assist with untangling the wires. His feet weren't as bad as his wrists, but they still looked ugly.

This was what Dee had avoided by being here instead of in her reality. He wondered if she'd realized yet that Lilith might still have gone after Samantha in the same way.

"Let's head back," he said, backing away from Dean when Dean looked ready to push. "We've got a lot to talk about."

****

He caught up with Dee just before she could open the driver's side door.

His usual constraints on hitting a woman were substantially inoperative, so he shoved her so hard that she slammed into the side of the car with an 'oof' as the breath left her lungs. Dean protested from behind them. Sam ignored him.

"What the _fuck_ were you thinking?" he demanded. "You let them _bleed_ him!"

Dee pushed off the car and stepped forward, her jaw clenched as she stared up at him. "I saw," she gritted out.

"Then why didn't you _do_ something?" Sam could sense Dean's approach, but he wasn't intervening. Either Dean was even more badly injured than he'd let on, or he thought they needed to have this out.

She shook her head slightly. "Had to look out for you."

Sam stared at her, because that wasn't even close to an answer. Unless—"Why? Because I'm the one who can get you back to your Samantha?"

She closed her eyes, and he remembered the butterfly softness of her lashes against his fingertips from earlier. "Yeah, sure."

So it was worse than that. He fell back a few steps, enough that he could see them both, tight jawlines and lowered brows, defiant and not at all guilty. The two of them had discussed the matter, agreed that Sam was more important than Dean, because Dee _was_ practically Dean and Sam was practically Samantha. Of course she'd gone along with Dean.

Sam couldn't think of a civil thing to say, so he just scowled as Dee opened the back door for Dean and eased him down so that he could stretch out and rest.

Sam drove.

****

The first thing he saw when they returned to the room was a little cornhusk angel, resting on the bed. He picked it up, cringing at the prickle of dry stalks. One of its wings scratched his index finger, drawing blood.

He read the demon's note that had been wrapped around it, which said pretty much what Dean had reported about the high school and the video store. The angel had been a bonus taunt, a reminder that Dean wasn't so much a person any more as he was a blunt instrument.

Forget saving the world. They weren't going to survive the week if things continued like this. Even though he knew Dean was bound to misinterpret the gesture, he couldn't stand to have the angel-poppet around. He soaked it in whiskey from one of the spare flasks and set it, along with the note, on fire, dropping it into an empty wastebasket and watching until it was nothing but stinking ash.

When he was able to pay attention again, he saw that Dee and Dean were waiting on the far bed, silent and watchful, their shoulders identically slumped. The bloody tissues piled between them suggested that Dee had taken care of Dean's wounds. "We need some better security," he told them.

He made them set every ward they'd ever heard of before he'd talk. "Here's what we know: Dee isn't here because Castiel brought her, and she doesn't seem to have any connection to Lilith. Her angelic powers—" Dean and Dee winced identically—"don't work here, but she's immune to our demons. That implies that demons and angels are reality-specific. And that means that if we can figure out how to get me over to Dee's reality, then I won't—" He had to stop then to pull himself together.

Anyway, it was enough for them to fill in the blanks. If he went, there'd be no working Antichrist, no seal to break. He took a deep breath, then another when the first one shuddered to a gasping halt. He could make this work. "So this is what the fortune-teller meant. It's my way out. If I'm one of the seals, then we take away the key to starting the apocalypse—"

"Satan's left with nothing in the ignition," Dee said, her face brightening at the thought.

"What's this 'I' shit?" Dean didn't look anywhere near as happy as Dee.

Sam stared at him, puzzled. Sam had brought him a way out: no need for anyone to die, much less _everyone_.

"I'm the problem," he explained. It didn't hurt as much as it used to. "You said it yourself, Dean."

Dean swallowed, his face darkening. "Why are you so sure it's Satan who wants the showdown, and not God?" he asked. "You're the one who loves normal, Sammy. I never had much use for it. That's not exactly the profile of somebody who saves the world."

Sam knew that wasn't entirely true, given that Dean spent his life trying to preserve normal for other people, but he could see how it was a crack that would let Castiel's message of the end times work its way into Dean's head.

"Castiel and Uriel _told_ us," Sam reminded him. They might have been dicks, but they were pretty clear on being anti-seal-breaking dicks. The important insight was that Dean could have a chance to have his own life. With Dee, if he wanted. "If I cross over into Dee's world, I'd be okay. You'd be safe."

"You asshole," Dean said.

It took Sam a minute to translate that.

"Fine," Sam conceded, his voice thick with the tears Dean didn't want to know about. "I guess you can tag along." Dean would do that, throw away his whole world, for Sam. It couldn't be worse than going to Hell for him.

There had been a time when Sam had promised himself that Dean was done making sacrifices.

Dean grinned at him, the way he'd grin when Sam caught a tossed ammo clip or found just the right incantation for a spell. That smile reminded him of the way they'd been at their best, back before things got so much worse than he ever could have imagined.

"So now we tell my Sam to pack, so she's ready to come here," Dee said. Sam glanced at the time and realized that they'd almost missed check-in. At least he hadn't managed to screw that up yet, but he had to act fast or Samantha would probably rip space-time open herself to see what had gone wrong.

He cut Dee's other arm this time, and tried a little less blood. And he put the portal on the wall, so that nobody would have to experience vertigo.

Samantha was there, unharmed. Apparently with Dee missing, everyone's plans were in shambles. Small favors.

No, Sam realized. Big favors. The whole point of this farce was that _both_ of them were necessary to the last battle. As long as each reality was missing at least one of them, Lilith's plans could be foiled. That gave him the flexibility he needed.

There was a lot of information to impart, but he found himself distracted by Samantha. She had her hair back in a ponytail, which made her face look even more angular, sort of like Sigourney Weaver: gorgeous but deadly, jawline sharp enough to cut glass. She looked like she hadn't slept well. Sam remembered that, how the silence of his room had been enough to wake him twelve times a night.

Once Dee confirmed the events of the day, Samantha immediately saw the virtues of his plan, and they agreed on a division of research responsibilities. (There were elements he didn't say out loud, but she either knew them or she didn't, and either way he'd deal when the time came.) Then he and Dean went outside while Dee had a private word with her sister. Sam really, really didn't want to know.

The night was clear and warm, the air soft against Sam's face. The light pollution meant that there were barely any stars visible. Cars passed by, a steady pulse. Dean's face was lit up in the harsh glare of headlights, then left to darkness.

At last, Dean stopped shifting his weight nervously. "So, uh. I guess I hurt you pretty bad earlier."

So much had happened that Sam had to replay the day in his mind, and he only remembered that Dean had knocked him out with his angel-granted voice the second time through. "It was the right thing to do."

"Sam." Dean's voice was thick. "I. When I used it, I saw—you looked. Different."

Right before Dean had gone to Hell, he'd been able to see the true forms of demons underneath their hosts. Sam guessed that his true form was something like that. He wondered just how ugly it was.

When Sam didn't react, Dean continued. "I wanted—right after I did it, when I saw you, I felt—I wanted you to fall."

Sam nearly cringed but managed to keep rigidly still. Since they'd been kids, the command to look after Sam had been etched too deeply into Dean to admit any other priorities, but apparently Heaven had access to heavier acid, wiping Dean clean and starting again. He'd thought he was getting used to being different, not quite Dean's brother any more, but it turned out that having Dean say it to him was far worse than thinking it to himself.

Dean had said earlier that he wanted to follow Sam, but that was while he was pretending that nothing had changed between them. Dean tended to grab onto the familiar when he was frightened. Given a real Winchester, one with untainted blood, to look after, he might do better.

"You really like her," he said. "Dee."

Dean scrunched up his face, that 'Sam is weird' look (if Sam were honest, it was 'Sammy is weird,' but he figured he got to name the look in his own mind). "Of course she's awesome, she's me with a rack. Think I might have to kill her if she doesn't shut up about driving my car, though."

"Dean, I'm serious."

"_Sam_," Dean imitated his tone but somehow injected a whine, "she's—whatever, it doesn't matter."

Right, because nothing mattered but the mission.

"Do you talk to her about Hell?"

Dean inhaled sharply.

"She _understands_, right?" Sam demanded, not sure why he was pressing the matter.

"No, we don't talk about it," Dean grated, sounding like he was in the wrong gear. "It's not like we went to the same high school. And for the record, Sam, the whole point—the _reason_ I get up in the morning is so that you will _never_ have to know what the Pit really is. You wanna do a sharing circle, fine. But keep it above ground."

Under other circumstances, Sam might have mustered amusement at the thought that they were protecting each other to death. He didn't entirely believe Dean's rationale for his silence, or at least he thought that Dean had some other reasons he couldn't make himself admit. Still, it was nice that Dean wanted to shield him, like their Dad instinctively throwing out his arm when he hit the brakes hard back when they were kids. Useless, a little irritating in its futility, but also a bit charming.

"You okay?" Dean asked after a minute passed. He was carefully staring out at the road.

Sam snorted. "Dean, I couldn't find okay with a GPS." Dean's face contorted, fear and guilt and other things Sam didn't want to sort through. "But I'd be crazy if I was okay, with everything that's happened. The important thing is that I'm going to fix this, I promise." He hadn't been able to keep Dean out of Hell or rescue him, but keeping him out of Heaven's clutches—yeah, Sam had no doubt that he'd pull it off somehow.

"If you don't," Dean began, and Sam shook his head. "Sam, it doesn't—if anyone can, it's you. But maybe it doesn't shake out that way." He stopped, and Sam could tell that he wanted to manage a grand, stupid claim, the kind that would ordinarily choke him with embarrassment but come out anyway. But Dean wasn't that kind of a liar, to say that it was all worth it or that everything would be fine as long as they stuck together.

"I know," Sam said, because he couldn't reassure Dean either, and he loved him anyway too.

****

When they went back to their room, Dee was alone. He expected her to leave, probably dragging Dean with, but she didn't, just sat at his laptop and surfed. Sam tried to concentrate on the task at hand, which was the matter of actually walking through into that other world. He was beginning to think that the fortune-teller had to have been some sort of demigod in her own right, because he simply couldn't figure out how to do more than transmit information.

He kept waiting for one of them to stand up and announce that they were going to go fuck, but neither of them said a word.

If he didn't know better, he'd think they were nervous.

He probably should have considered this beforehand (ideally, before he let the little head do the thinking), but he'd been deliberately ignoring the issue. He was a healthy young man with a definite need for stress release, and obviously neither Dean nor Dee had a problem with that. But to join them—and _he'd_ be joining _them_, he had very little doubt on that score—implied a deliberation he wasn't sure he wanted to accept.

He could have his nose pressed against the glass or he could walk away from the entire situation. No, that was untrue. He could choose his distance, but only within a very limited range.

Sam stood up and started unbuttoning his shirt. Dee pushed the mouse away and turned in her seat, watching. He felt his cheeks flush, but he kept going, not looking at either of them, tossing the shirt off towards the bag of dirty laundry against the wall.

Dee crossed the room, standing inches from him. "Need some help?" she offered, running her hand down the front of his T-shirt, then back up once she'd gotten below the hem, rippling the fabric as her fingers moved over his skin. He raised his arms, allowing her to pull it off. He heard Dean shift in his chair, imagined him leaning back, spreading his legs, his fingers moving over the neck of his bottle of beer.

Her breasts were soft and heavy in his hands. She smiled at him, never looking past him, as he helped her out of her borrowed shirt. She shook her head to resettle her hair, calculated and natural all at once, and he popped the clasp on her bra.

When they tumbled down to the bed, he put her on her hands and knees, keeping his eyes focused on the smooth golden skin of her back, the dusting of freckles across her shoulders. She had a farmer's tan too, odder somehow on a girl, the skin darkest on her left bicep where her arm would rest in the sun when she was driving. He ignored Castiel's handprint like he was ignoring everything else.

He shoved inside her as soon as possible, making her squeak, and bent over her so that he saw nothing but the muscles of her back and shoulders, smelled nothing but her hair (except it was Dean's shampoo), tasted nothing but her skin (sharp and sweet, like green apples). She shuddered under him when he used his teeth, so he kept doing it, not quite hard enough to draw blood. He didn't look up, even when he heard movement nearby.

When he reached around to stroke between her legs, she freed one of her own hands to guide him, faster and harder than he would have tried on his own. They were galloping together, and he had to fight himself to keep from coming before she did. As soon as she clenched around him and cried out, he jerked and crashed down, his head filled with light.

He rolled off, letting the day catch up with him, all the pain and fear and unexpected pleasure. He was nearly dreaming, listening to Dean tell her to stay right there, watching or imagining through nearly-closed eyes how Dean set his teeth right in the places Sam had just marked. Her soft choked-off noises were almost like a lullabye.

Dean hated sleep now. Sam chased it like an addict. He let it pour into his veins and pretended that all was well.

****

They were making out when he woke, thick liquid sounds of their mouths meeting and parting, slow shift of the bed, not quite enough to make Sam do anything more than turn on his side and blink. He was so warm, the bed heavy with the heat of their bodies bleeding across the few inches of sheet that separated them. Dean always ran hotter than Sam, and Sam felt sweat pop up on the back of his neck and in the creases behind his knees.

Dean's cheeks were dark with stubble. Dee's were flushed where he must have scraped against her. Their eyes were both half-closed, thick lashes fanning over flashes of green. He was half on top of her, on the other side of her from Sam. They moved together slowly, in perfect time, like it wasn't the tenth time they'd fucked or even the hundredth. Like they weren't fucking at all.

Dean stroked down Dee's shoulder, over her breast, his hand tan and veined in contrast to the paler smoothness of her skin. His ring caught the hint of sunlight coming in through the edges of the blinds.

He looked up from where he was nuzzling Dee's cheek, his eyes deep and dark as he examined Sam. "Hey," he said softly. "Looks like somebody needs some attention." He rolled off of Dee, who stifled a noise and folded herself down towards Sam's cock, which was already more than interested. Her mouth was even hotter than he remembered.

Dean rearranged himself behind Dee, who was on her side, pulling her leg back to rest on top of his thigh as he pushed into her. His hand covered her hip, just like Dee was clutching at Sam's hipbone, thumbing the hollow there.

"She's takin' good care of you, isn't she?" Dean rumbled—almost closer to a croon, really.

He's giving her to me, Sam thought muzzily, and couldn't figure out whether that was horrible or wonderful. His orgasm was slow and golden and enough to put him back under for a long time.

****

After he finally got up, the day passed with the combination of agonizing slowness and lost time standard for any difficult research task. He gave Dean and Dee books of lore that he couldn't imagine would help, just in case Dean had one of his occasional flashes of crazy-perfect lateral thinking, and also to keep them marginally more quiet.

Midmorning, the next seal nearly opened. He felt the direction now—somewhere to the distant west, maybe even as far as Japan. A wave of unreality passed through him, but then dissipated into nothingness like a demon falling apart. There was no power boost, which meant that the angels had fought off an attempt, but he could feel how close it had been. And he knew that they had to win every battle, while Lilith just needed one victory that would surely not be long in coming.

When he took a piss, he thought he smelled sulfur, which meant hiding in the bathroom long enough to force the tiny translucent window in the shower open and wait for the smell to dissipate. He did not spend any time staring into the mirror and waiting for his eyes to flash yellow. Dean noticed his absence after a while and threw out the standard gibes through the flimsy bathroom door. Sam told him to fuck off, and that seemed to satisfy him.

Dean snuck off with Dee for a quickie before lunch. Dee paused with her hand on the doorframe, but he just looked down, and after a moment she left. They had the grace not to make so much noise that he heard them through the wall.

Of course Dean would have shared; that wasn't the problem. Or, it was, but not in the right way. There were too many Winchesters here. Dean was never going to know what he actually wanted while Sam was constantly needing his help.

Sam was tense through the afternoon, almost useless enough that he wished he'd gone with them.

****

"You were a real good kid," Dean said while they were sharpening the knives. Sam had begun the task as a distraction from his fruitless searching and Dean had joined in for reasons of his own that he hadn't bothered to explain. Dee had retreated to her room to shower and nap, so it almost felt normal again.

Sam examined him. "Where did that come from?" he asked cautiously.

"You didn't complain about stuff," Dean continued instead of answering.

Okay, so Sam had promised to try to understand, but so far he was comprehension-free. "Dean, I complained _all the time_."

"Yeah, 'cause you're a whiny bitch," Dean rejoined, then continued, before Sam's confusion could spill out into words: "But not about stuff other kids would've. The whole summer you were fourteen, you wore that same pair of tennis shoes with the toes torn out. You said it was 'cause you liked them. I really appreciated that, you know."

Sam's throat was full—of tears, words, something. He could only blink at Dean. "We're going to make it," he said. If Dean was putting this into words, then he must be rating their chances somewhere below those of penguins in Hawaii.

Dean looked up and raised his eyebrows. "Course we are, Sammy."

****

As if needing time to decompress from that moment of emotional revelation, Dean volunteered to go get dinner, leaving Sam to continue his research and Dee to channel-surf, lying on her stomach with her socked feet all over the pillows of (naturally) Sam's bed.

Sam couldn't concentrate with Dean gone. He couldn't help thinking that, if they went through to Dee's world together, he'd still be more without Dean than with.

He'd seen it coming for so long, how the two of them had crossed paths and taken up the other's burdens: Sam, stitched into the hunter's life so thoroughly that even death hadn't been able to remove him. Dean, hoping for something different, looking beyond his family at last even if it had taken an angel of the Lord to catch his eye. And now there was Dee as well, a human presence reminding Dean of how much life there was outside the endless roll of the wheels over asphalt.

Maybe Dee could be more than another threat. After all, he had to admit, she knew Dean better than anybody else.

"If we get out of this," he began. Dee looked over at him warily, as if expecting another disquisition on danger and impossibility. He waited, and she clicked off the TV, acknowledging that she needed to pay attention. "_When_ we get out of this. I'm afraid we won't be able to—please tell me what he wants from me. I'll do anything."

She sucked in a breath, but her expression wasn't surprised, and she took him seriously enough to think before she answered. "Not really, though." He stared at her. She rolled over and sat on the side of the bed closest to him. "You didn't give up Ruby. Not before Hell and not after. You'd do anything that you _agreed_ to do. Not the same thing."

He couldn't sit still for this discussion. His joints creaked when he stood. Hunting was a good way to get an old man's body, if not a good way to get old. The room was warm from hours of them breathing the same air. He crossed the floor, stopping a few feet away from her. "I—" He flailed for the right words, the ones that would do the job.

"You had your reasons," she agreed. "Not saying you didn't. But, Sam, God and Satan've been setting things up so we're on opposite sides. That took a long time to do, and it won't get fixed just 'cause you jump through some magic mirror."

"He's all I've got left," he said, letting everything into his voice and his expression.

Her face contorted in what he only realized was fury after he was reeling back from her punch. (Dean was right, she had an excellent roundhouse.) He blinked at her, tasting blood, his tongue flicking out to sting the new wound further. "How fucking flattering," she sneered, shaking her hand out. "At least Castiel pretended to pick me. I'm not good, I'm not right, I'm just _left_."

"That's not—" Dee was already turning away, and Sam stopped. "You're right," he admitted, because that had been a terrible thing to say, and Dee could only have heard her sister saying it to her. Of course she wouldn't want to be Samantha's last resort. "But you're wrong, too. If it weren't for him, I'd—I wouldn't care whose side I was on. Dean's the best proof I've ever seen that God already got it right. He's—he's the one thing that never moves. He's my place to stand. That's why it's all been so crazy since he got back, because when he's not sure, how can I be?"

Her mouth was open just a little when he finished. Her eyes shone, green and clear. "That's awful nice to hear," she said slowly. "And if you were my Sam, I bet I wouldn't notice how that's not really me. That's some idea you built in your head, and you did it real good because you're smart like that, but me—Dean—we're _real_, we use all the shampoo and leave the towels on the floor, we fart and we play the wrong music too loud, we embarrass you in front of strangers—"

She stepped back into his space, yanking her head up at a ridiculous angle to keep her eyes locked into his even as she grabbed his hand and put it at the join of her elbow, where the cut he'd given her last night was rough against his fingertips. "We bleed, Sam. You chase that Dean in your mind, you'll always be lookin' at the one next to you, wondering why he's not right. Keeping secrets from him because you can't be sure he'll react the way he oughta." They were both panting, ridiculously loud in the silent room. "We just want you to see."

He couldn't take another word, so he grabbed her head in both hands, tangling his fingers in her hair as he nearly smashed their faces together. She opened to him as smooth as a perfectly maintained switchblade, and he wasn't surprised to taste blood—hers, his, theirs. He was stunned all over again by how good she smelled, how her shoulders fit into his hands, how when she hissed the sound curled into his brain and drove out all thought.

Sam kept his eyes open all the way through this time.

****

Later, he watched her back—her shoulderblade rising like a wall against a siege as she curled into herself on the bed—and thought.

Dee was right. He'd been selfish, treating Dean like the shadow of some platonic ideal. Clinging to him like a child might hang on to a stuffed animal, because Dean was the only security Sam had ever known, and after Stanford the only security he ever imagined he might get.

Dean deserved more than to be a symbol, whether to Sam or to Heaven. Right now they were just pawns, and they would be as long as Lilith and Castiel thought they could use the Winchesters against each other.

He had a window. He needed a door. He needed a tool strong enough to break open a wall that should have stayed closed.

"Hey," he said, seriously enough that Dee couldn't rightly ignore him.

Dee's shoulders hunched briefly, then she rolled over on the bed to face him.

"I think I know how to open up the barriers between the worlds," he said, a bit embarrassed to be using the term 'worlds.' "But we don't have the juice to do it."

"What would it take?" Dee asked, already clambering to her feet. Sam looked away so as not to get distracted by her nudity.

He shook his head. "The mercy seat. The Holy Grail. The nails used to crucify Jesus. Something big and bad, something that's part of this whole ultimate sacrifice thing everyone seems to want to see me and Dean do."

A wave of some unclassifiable emotion crossed her face, and then she ran her hands through her hair, looking around the room. "Where's your phone?"

"I don't think Domino's delivers—"

That got him a look of such contempt that he felt himself shriveling in self-defense. "Phone, doofus." She bent and rummaged around in his jeans until she extracted it, then hit redial without looking. "Dean? Get your ass back here."

"What—?"

"I really think you're gonna want to hear this from him," she said, then looked guiltily away. Which meant, most likely, he wasn't going to want to hear it at all.

****

"There's a sword," Dean said. Dee nodded grimly.

"A sword," Sam repeated.

"It's, uh, I guess it's Michael's sword." In the past year they'd both become familiar enough with angelic lore to know that Michael's sword would be at the forefront of the battle of the end times.

"You didn't mention that," Sam said mildly.

Dean scowled. "Yeah, well, you didn't mention anything about _your_ love affair with Ruby, so—"

"It isn't a—" Sam stopped, struck by how Dean had said that. "Dean?"

Dean turned away, stalking towards the window so that he could brace his hands on the sill and stare out at the parking lot. His shoulders were hunched beneath his red-and-black flannel shirt.

Dee stood in place, nearly vibrating with discomfort. "Castiel's an angel of the Lord," she said, as if _she_ had something to apologize to him for.

Castiel had been sent for Dean, and from what Sam had seen, he'd be willing to call what Castiel felt love. Not quite human, but then human love could be so very disappointing.

Sam didn't know why he hadn't connected the dots earlier and seen how some part of Dean might have been parched for Castiel's words, his regard. Sam had never _wanted_ to be important. He'd only ever wanted to make his own choices. Dean, though—but Dean was ready to leave his exalted place behind, too, for Sam's safety.

Dean cleared his throat. "Anyway, there's a sword."

Which still didn't explain why Dean would have hidden that knowledge, of all things. Only: "It's for me, isn't it." His thoughts raced. It all made sense now. The seal wasn't him; it was in the relationship between them. That was why there were two angels, one to guide Dean and one to watch Sam. Keeping the seal closed would require more than just a killing. It would require an _offering_. Dean had already demonstrated with Samhain that he was willing to give his life and Sam's to save others. And Sam could do his part by submitting instead of fighting, because the angels' prophecy said that the seal would break if he fought.

Dean bowed his head so that it rested against the glass of the window. "It's not like I got saved from Hell because I was such a righteous man," he said, the loathing thick in his voice. "Giving up your own life? That's cake. The last battle, though—that's gonna take more. Like killing someone you sold your soul for."

Sam swallowed and thought about approaching Dean, hugging him close. He couldn't imagine it happening without a struggle. Now Dean's connection to Castiel made even more sense. Dad had told Dean pretty much the same thing, that he'd have to kill Sam for the greater good. Sam had prayed because he believed, not because he thought that God had specific marching orders for him. Dean, though, had always confused Father with God, a fault line running through him, and the earth was well and truly moving now.

"I wasn't ever going to use it," Dean said into the silence.

"I know," Sam said, feeling the waters of this conversation getting high enough to drown him.

Dean spun around, face tight with fury. "Maybe you shouldn't be so fucking confident!" he snapped, his fists raised as if he wanted Sam to start swinging. _He's an angel of the Lord_, Dee's voice echoed in Sam's mind. Dee had retreated further, into the far corner of the room. What a nightmare this must be for her, watching it all play out and unable to act.

Sam held up his hands. "It's okay," he said and meant it. "We've got another use for that sword. Can you get it now?"

Dean nodded jerkily. "I can get it any time. I just have to ask. I have to ask."

"Jesus," Sam said involuntarily, stunned by the cruelty of it, barely noticing the way the word made his skin prickle.

"Not a name I'm real thrilled with right now," Dean pointed out. Dee snorted agreement, which seemed to remind Dean of her existence. He looked over at her nervously, and relaxed a little when she smiled.

"I'll start setting up for the ritual," Sam said. "Once we have the sword, we can do it quick."

Dean left without waiting for Sam to wish him luck.

****

Sam summoned Ruby. He thought about asking Dee to leave, but in the end he didn't. Watching Ruby and Dee sneer at each other would have been amusing under other circumstances.

"We don't have time for a catfight," he said, which made them both scowl at him. "Dean went to go get his sword. So if you've got anything for me, now's the time."

Ruby's eyes flickered black. "And her?"

"She's on our side," Sam said dismissively. "Tick-tock, Ruby."

"Shit," she swore, turning away from him and putting her fisted hands on her hips. "I really thought Dean's pathetic devotion to you would keep him from flipping."

Sam surreptitiously checked to see that Dee wasn't going to blow her cover by reacting badly to that. Amazingly, Dee didn't look like she was about to launch herself at Ruby, though she was snarling. Maybe being a girl gave her a better handle on her temper. "It's hard to defy the will of God," he pointed out.

Ruby tilted her head. "Not that fucking hard, Sam." Which made him want to ask how she knew she wasn't just doing what God wanted. God's plan did seem to involve a two-sided battle. But he didn't think that debating free will was his best strategy. Anyway, Ruby still had more to say. "I need to know if you're ready. If we're not going to make it through this, I don't want to spend my last hours running stupid errands for a guy who can't get it done."

Sam took a deep breath. "He left me," he told her, not having to try to get his voice to shake. "I did everything I could and he still left me. But I'm not going to stop fighting. You know me, Ruby. Do you think I'm giving up?"

She stared at him, as if she wanted to open up his skull and look directly at the contents. Try all she liked, she couldn't read his mind, so he met her gaze and waited, ready.

At last, she nodded. "I'll be right back." She wheeled around and left the room, closing the door behind her as gently as if she actually cared how much noise they made.

"After she gives you whatever she's got, can I kill her?" Dee asked matter-of-factly.

Sam blinked at her. Her hands were clenching and unclenching at her sides, twitching for a gun or a knife, and her look of disgust was too familiar. Sam felt the customary churning in his stomach, the reflected embarrassment from watching Dean's hatred spew out. Sam had always feared that Dean's contempt for Ruby was partly projection. "Let's not try to do too much at once," he suggested. "Once it's all over, knock yourself out."

Dee pouted, then went to watch at the window.

When Ruby returned, she was carrying a box, dark wood covered with incised designs. The wood was old and porous, rough against Sam's fingers. The designs swirled and tangled over the surface like the clouds of a demon entering or leaving a body. Looking at them made Sam's head ache, and the box was warm and greasy-feeling in his hands, though it left no residue.

The box had a simple toggle on one side keeping it closed. He twisted and flipped open the lid while Ruby stared at him like he was about to explode. Inside, it was lined with faded fabric that might once have been red, so old that it was stiff and shredded. Something was puddled at the bottom, black shading to gray. Sam reached in—two somethings, sliding across one another like dead fish, pricking his fingers as he pulled the top one out.

It was a glove, he realized as he held it up for inspection. Made out of confetti-sized bits of steel wired together, the metal blackened with age but glints of silver peeking through where the glove flexed and shifted. His skin buzzed from the contact, not an unpleasant feeling. He wanted very much to try it on.

"If it doesn't fit, you must submit," Ruby said.

Sam stared at her incredulously, his concentration broken.

She rolled her eyes. "Fine. They're mystical weapons, all right? You put them on, they should protect you from the worst of what the other side throws at you. Try not to get hit with the sword."

He didn't bother to thank her. He wanted to put the gloves on, just to see what they were like. Fighting off the impulse occupied so much of his attention that he barely heard her sigh and stalk away.

Ruby stopped at the threshold of the room. "Good luck, Sam."

He dragged his attention away from the gloves and managed to nod at her before she was gone. The gloves looked like they'd be snug. It would be pretty ridiculous if the apocalypse had to be called on account of Sam's excessive size. Probably he should check the fit, just in case.

"Sam?" Dee asked, nervous. "Maybe you should, I dunno, put those away until we're ready."

He knew she was making sense, but at the same time—

She was standing beside him, reaching for him, and he ripped himself away, crumpling the glove in his hand as he hunched over the box and its precious contents.

"Okay," she said carefully, "you're gettin' a little Gollum on me here."

"Yeah," he acknowledged. Then, as it sunk in: "Yeah." Carefully, he uncurled his fingers from around the glove—it felt like pulling needles out of his skin, or maybe the tendrils of some fast-growing plant, embedded in him and not wanting to let go—and dropped it back into the box, slamming the lid before he could think better of it.

****

They opened the communication portal again to warn Samantha about what was coming.

Sam explained his theory and, as Dee's attention wandered, talked with Samantha about her theories of the seals. He filled her in on Dean's revelations about the sword, and Samantha's betrayed expression drove Dee from the room entirely.

When he was sure she was gone, Sam turned back to Samantha. "You know they—they're getting along well."

She nodded.

"And you know what Lilith and Castiel are working up to."

A muscle flickered in her cheek. "If the seal is us, our choices, then our world is already safe." Without Dee, there was no one on Heaven's side to come for her, and no one for Samantha to fight. "I haven't felt a seal break since she's been gone."

"I have," Sam said. It was all the confirmation he needed.

Unsurprisingly, Dee had taken all of thirty seconds to change her mind. She opened the door as Sam stared into Samantha's face, wanting to be as fierce as she looked, and said, "So, we're agreed."

Samantha nodded and dismissed Sam from her attention, turning hungry-eyed to Dee. Dee approached. Sam stepped out of her way. She put her hand up to the wall, but instead of going palm-to-palm as Sam had expected, they bumped fists, or as close as possible. "See you on the flipside," Dee said, so tenderly that Sam almost turned away.

Samantha smiled, and Sam truly hoped she was usually a better liar. But she pressed her lips together to stop the trembling and caught his eyes, warning him wordlessly to take good care of her sister as long as he could, no matter what else happened.

Sam cut the connection.

****

Then they were waiting for Dean.

"It's been cool," Dee said, unprompted, when Sam had finished laying out all the materials he thought he'd need. "Knowing what my Sam would be like as a guy."

She was smiling at him, a soft, approving look that Sam hadn't seen on Dean's face in years. It was nice to think that maybe he just hadn't been allowed to see it. He felt his own lips curving in answer.

Dee turned so that she was examining the ritual knives. "Just proves what I always knew: girls rule, boys drool."

Sam snorted. He wasn't in the mood to fight, even in jest, and he wasn't sure he disagreed.

"Anyway," she said, turning a blade in her hand so that her eyes flashed at him in reflection, "I figure we won't have another chance, so I thought you should know. No matter how mad he is, he—he loves you more than anything. Through Hell and back, when Castiel kept trying to make it all about God."

"I know," Sam said gently, mostly because Dean wouldn't want her to be saying this.

Dee shook her head. "He—I'm not saying he didn't get scared, maybe think about lettin' you go. But he still—It's you. Even when he doesn't get you, even when you scare the shit out of him."

"I know, Dee," he repeated, but it was like she was playing a recorded message.

"He chose you. He's scared of Hell, so scared he'd rather not have been born at all if that's where he's headed back to, but if he does what he's supposed to then it's back to Hell anyway, 'cause that's what giving up on you would be."

Sam went to her and wrapped her in his arms, ignoring her insincere wriggling, until she was flush against him, his chin resting on her head. She squeezed him back just a little, but seemed content to rest in his grasp.

"She knows," he said at last. Dee sucked in a breath that was almost a gasp, then went even more liquid in his arms, warm and sweet-smelling and close to perfect.

Dean had given so much for so long. He deserved better than Heaven was offering him. Sam wasn't going to let him make another sacrifice. It was time for Sam to be the grown-up.

When he tugged Dee over to the bed and pulled her down, she didn't struggle long, and she was asleep almost at once.

****

Dean's key scraping in the door woke them up and sent them scurrying to opposite sides of the bed, even though they were fully dressed and Dean wouldn't be seeing anything he didn't know about if they hadn't been.

Sam forgot about it immediately when the door swung open and Dean hesitated before entering.

Dean should have looked ridiculous holding a sword. He was wearing distressed jeans and a beat-up leather jacket over a tight black T-shirt, hardly knight-in-shining-armor or even Monty Python knight material. And his grip should have been awkward. Dean could fight with pool cues, baseball bats, pipe wrenches, and, on one memorable occasion, a garden rake, but the longest blade he'd ever used was a machete. Somehow, though, his hand on the hilt looked as natural as it did holding a gun, and the brown scabbard riding on his hip could have been there for years.

The hilt of the sword wasn't ornate. The squarish silver metal was darkened to near-black with age. Strips of something leathery were wrapped around it for a better grip, elephant-gray with a purplish sheen. Sam thought about descriptions he'd read of Leviathan and shuddered. He felt an ugly cold radiating from it, a dissonant note at the back of his head like a scream of despair. He wanted to reach out with his power and fling the thing several states away, if not into orbit.

Dee stared at the sword with open hunger, which made Sam even less happy about Dean's calm, prepared demeanor. "Can I see it?" she asked, hushed.

Dean's gaze flicked over to Sam. "I don't—"

"You probably shouldn't draw it until we're ready," Sam suggested, so that Dean wouldn't have to deny her.

The sword hated him. He could feel its poison, seeping through the air. Give it a couple of hours, and Dean might be ready to fulfill his mission.

He went over to the box Ruby had left and pulled out the gloves. Gauntlets, he thought. If Dean could have a sword, why not gauntlets? As soon as they settled on his skin, he felt less threatened. The buzz-saw of the sword was still present, but muted. Then it doubled tenfold.

He turned and saw that Dean had pulled it a foot out of the sheath. The metal was as pure as water, gleaming like starlight. The whine in his head was a dentist's drill and he had to force his hands from covering his ears.

"Dean!"

"What the fuck are those?" Dean's aborted gesture brought the sword almost halfway free.

He held his hands up, which might not have been the smartest move, but he put his palms out reassuringly. "Please, put the sword back. Dean, it's still me. It's me. This is just part of what we need, okay? We need a lot of power in a small space."

Dean's forehead dampened with sweat. His hand shook, the sword clanking softly against the scabbard.

Dee stepped in between them, closing in on Dean until she rested her hand on his wrist. It looked like she had to push pretty hard to get him to slide the sword back into place. Then she shifted, so that she was standing at his shoulder, her eyes flicking between Dean's face and the sword, little covetous glances that she couldn't seem to stop.

"You told me to get it," Dean grated out.

Sam thought it inadvisable to admit that he hadn't understood how the sword would affect them. For that matter, he could feel rage bubbling at the edges of his consciousness, thick and red as lava. He could imagine it coating his hands, strengthening them as he reached out and crushed Dean's throat.

He shook himself, remembering what Dee had said about Castiel's prophecy: if the demon strikes, the seal will break. The gauntlets had to be part of this, tempting him the same way the sword was tempting Dean. "I know," he admitted, waiting until Dean met his eyes again. "Dean, I'm feeling the same things, okay? But we're not gonna give in."  
Dean nodded grimly.

"So what now?" Dee asked.

Sam had already drawn every protective rune and sigil he knew, plus the ones that gathered power in. The contradiction alone would be enough to make their location blaze like Las Vegas in the desert on the psychic plane.

"Now we open the door." He'd already drawn a line down the center of the room. No more using walls—he wasn't going to risk anybody getting _embedded_ in a physical object.

He picked up the ritual knife. The gloves (slick and warm inside as the guts of a dying man; reassuring) fit so well that they were unnoticeable, no barrier at all. But when he imagined slicing into Dee's arm, he had a hard time imagining himself _stopping_. He held the blade out to her, handle first. "I need you to bleed down this line," he told her.

She didn't ask why he'd given her the knife.

They watched as she dripped her blood, Winchester blood, in a solid line, nearly obscuring Sam's chalk markings. Dean's hand was clenched around the hilt of his sword like a boy with his teddy bear.

As she finished, the air _moved_, hard enough that Sam staggered back a step. His skin crawled with the increased proximity to the sword, but the important thing was that there was now a translucent white wall, as if someone had trapped the output of a smokestack in between panes of invisible glass, running down the center of the room. A few feet of the beds protruded out of the fog.

Sam exhaled.

"Don't touch that," he cautioned Dee, who was already stretching out her hand, like a five-year-old. The reproving look she gave him was no more mature, but she waited.

"Dean, cut a hole big enough to go through."

Sam only just managed to dart out of the way as Dean drew the sword, cringing back against the side of the room. Dean's arm wavered, and Sam saw how he had to wrench his attention back to the ghost wall. But when he swung, it was in an arc as perfect as a glass-cutter's, tracing out a circle outlined in cool blue fire.

Dean stepped back and, after a long unpleasant moment, resheathed the sword. The circle glowed, blank and silent.

"Okay," Dee said, too calmly. "Now what?"

Sam wanted to approach Dean, but with the sword and the gloves it was too dangerous. "Remember, you need to wait for Samantha. Otherwise there's a big risk you're sticking Dee here alone." It was probably the only threat capable of keeping Dean from jumping right after him.

Sam stepped over to the circle and reached out with his metal-coated hands. He heard the shuffle of feet as Dee dragged Dean backwards, and was grateful she was there to keep them from getting lost. When his fingers touched the neon-blue arc, his stomach lurched violently and his head filled with daggers, but he pressed forward and his hands sunk into the barrier.

Carefully, he followed the line Dean had drawn, even as the pain intensified, cramps crawling up his hands to his arms and shoulders. He pulled as he went, loosening the material inside the circle—it was solid and air at the same time, uncanny and nauseating.

When he'd managed to get all the way around, he curled his fingers into the edge, one hand on each side, and stepped back, hanging on with every iota of strength both mental and physical.

He heard a thousand windows shattering, a cascade of glass that merged into the shriek of a single wounded voice. The substance in his hands fell to nothingness. And there was a hole in the world.

This wasn't like the window that let them talk to Samantha. It was a full-on vortex, offering no glimpse of the reality beyond, swirling purple with crackles of lightning that seethed through the center and wriggled around the edges. As Sam watched, a bolt of energy jumped from the portal to the nearest lamp, exploding the light bulb and leaving the room illuminated only by the portal's bruised, unnatural light.

"Hey," Dee said, her hand catching Dean's elbow, tugging at his jacket.

Dean turned back to her, and without another word they were kissing, kissing violently, Dee bowed back with Dean's hand fisted in her hair. Kissing like Rick and Ilsa, knowing that it was the last time and that they'd chosen to make it that way.

Victor Laszlo had been a weakling. A real man would have done what he needed to do without destroying other lives in the process.

Sam screwed his courage to the sticking point and thrust himself through.

****

Time compressed into a single dot. Or maybe it was space, Sam folding in on himself until he was no larger than an ant's footprint. He was rushing through black water, crushed by the gravity of it, choking with the absence of air. He was soaring through blood-blue skies, a missile with no destination, seething with nuclear fires. He was shooting out in every direction like the Big Bang, galaxies formed from every tooth and bit of bone, his blood flaring into paths made of stars.

He saw himself die in his crib, at age four when the car crashed, at six when the shtriga sucked him dry, at eighteen when a blood vessel burst in his brain, at twenty-two and twenty-three and twenty-four, a thousand deaths, a million more where he lived and lived and lived, past the end of the world, safe in his place in Hell. He saw Dean, whole and broken, fighting to the end or oblivious or years dead. He saw Dad and Jess and Mom and Sarah and Madison, and other people he didn't recognize, all the ways it might have gone for him, but he never saw the portal. This was something new.

****

There was a shock of static electricity as Sam tumbled into regular existence, falling to his knees. He'd seen something during the journey, but it was already slipping away, lost in contrast to the undeniably real scrape of cheap carpet against his knees.

Deep down, he hadn't really believed it would work. They didn't just _win_; that wasn't what happened to Winchesters.

He raised his head and saw the room he'd just left, except that he was facing the other way now. It was disorienting, but what was even more bizarre was the way the buzz in his head, a constant companion since just after Dean's death when Ruby began his instruction, was just gone. It was like having a cast taken off, or a fever breaking: the strangeness of normalcy. The gauntlets were suddenly limp metal on his hands, just weird and scratchy. Dead. He peeled them off and let them drop to the floor.

Samantha stood watching him, her hands deep in her jacket. Her face was unreadable, which sounded implausible, but he really didn't have much experience analyzing his own tells. He could see the barrel of the gun distorting the fabric of the right pocket, and he raised his hands as he sat back on his haunches. "Just me," he said. "It worked."

She nodded. He looked into her tilted hazel eyes and noticed that she was about the same height as Jess had been. She scrutinized him in return. He wanted very much to know exactly what Dee had been saying to her.

Sam closed his eyes for a second, readying himself. "You could go," he suggested. It might be dangerous, putting a matched set on one side, but he thought Dean's sword would be unlikely to work properly on Samantha, just as his gauntlets apparently had no purchase here.

Samantha had seen her sister go through the same changes. She hadn't been a third wheel these past few days, but she could imagine just what it was like. She took a deep breath. "Like I'd let you stick me with both of them," she said, her voice shredded but unwavering.

Sam was pathetically grateful that she wasn't going to leave him alone. And it was smarter. Regardless of what they'd said to their siblings, segregating the black hats from the white was the most orderly way to save the worlds.

Samantha began to chant as Sam stood up. It was a standard ritual of closing, but Sam wouldn't have been surprised to learn that she was putting a substantial complement of demonic power behind it. After a moment, the portal began to darken and speed up its swirling. The air pressure in the room continued to drop, and the window blinds clacked like the bones of a skeleton in the unnatural wind.

There was a pop, like a lightbulb breaking, and a wave of energy ran through them both like the tide as the portal vanished. Sam staggered but kept his feet.

They were alone.

Sam just breathed.

****

After a while, Samantha turned away from the space where the portal had been. "How mad do you think they are right now?"

Sam shrugged. "How mad is there?"

She attempted a wobbly smile.

"But they're safe," he pointed out, and got a look at how his own expression was when Dean said something redundant. It wasn't all that flattering.

"We should—" she began, and then her hand shot to her head, pressing as if she were trying to stop a spurting wound. Her face contorted, her mouth open on a voiceless scream. She staggered and Sam hurried to catch her, but she righted herself before he could do more than put his hand on her shoulder. She pulled away like he was made of ice and went to sit down, slumping into her chair as she swiped at her face. When she brought her hands down, he saw traces of blood on her fingers, but he couldn't figure out its source.

"What is it?" If this was what he'd looked like having a vision, no wonder Dean had always hated the powers so much.

She kept her eyes closed. "Two seals, one right on top of the other."

Sam felt like collapsing himself. It was supposed to be over.

Lilith must have figured out a workaround—as long as she had Samantha, she might not need Dee. Maybe there was some other human for her to fight with, or maybe Castiel had been right all along and the battle was within her soul. For Dean, Sam could have laid down his life. Without him, Sam would have fought, not because he had hope but because he refused to give in. There wasn't much of a chance that Samantha was different on that count.

He shuffled over to the nearest bed and sat down, rubbing his hands through his hair and not looking up.

After a few minutes, Samantha's phone buzzed, skittering along the table where it was resting next to her laptop.

She was steady enough to grab it. "Yeah." She listened for a minute, frowning. "I don't know, Bobby. Samuel came through all right, but we don't—No. No. I said, no. This is not the time—I'll call you back."

Snapping the phone closed, she grimaced at Sam. "Bobby's not real pleased with me right now. He mostly puts up with me, but he _loves_—" She stopped, as if just now considering whether she ought to use the past tense. "Anyway, he says a couple of hunters tried that mass exorcism trick we pulled in Colorado, worked fine but now there are all these comets falling out of the sky."

Sam nodded. A mass exorcism would account for the seal he'd opened back in his world, and then some separate battle had been lost over the other one.

At the time they'd told Bobby about the recorded exorcism they'd used in Monument, it had seemed like an important advance in the state of the art, one worth spreading to other hunters. He'd forgotten that there was rarely any weapon that an enemy couldn't also use.

"Bobby knows about how you feel the seals?"

She shook her head, which wasn't all that surprising. Maybe she was better at extracting information from angels than he was, but he found it hard to imagine any version of himself telling Bobby information withheld from Dean.

At least he had an idea of how to strengthen her against Lilith's next move. "You'd better get in touch with your Ruby, get a hold of these gauntlets—" he pointed at the little pile on the floor. "They're creepy and evil, and you really shouldn't put them on until you need them, but they've got power."

"Fine," she said. "Any other bright ideas?"

He'd really, really hoped to have a breather. But Dean was safe, which was what counted, so it was time to man up.

"Let's get to work," he told her.

****

Five hours later, he kind of wanted to kill her regardless of the apocalypse, and he was pretty sure she felt the same. Each time one of them came up with a new theory about Lilith, the other was able to shoot it down instantly. Not that surprising, given that they'd both been working on the problem of Lilith since they'd heard her name in connection with Dean/Dee's deal, but frustrating nonetheless. Dean would have made them go out for a run to clear their heads. Instead, Samantha was translating an Aramaic text and Sam was checking to make sure the apocrypha were the same here as they were in his reality.

"This isn't working," Samantha said at last.

"I'm open to suggestions," Sam said, regretting a little bit how annoying his tone was.

Samantha mumbled something that Sam sincerely doubted was flattering. Then she took a deep breath. "We need a break."

Sam didn't necessarily want to go out into the world. While they stayed in the motel room, it was almost like Dean might be just around the corner. The duffel shoved in the space between the bed and the wall might be his.

"We could order some food," he suggested. And then he thought what Dee might have suggested as a break, and felt himself flush like he'd been dipped in boiling water.

Samantha tilted her head curiously, then reddened herself as she followed his thoughts. This double identity thing could get creepy fast, he realized.

On the other hand, Dean and Dee had seemed pretty happy. Understanding your partner perfectly had to be spectacular.

Nobody was there to judge him and Samantha, or make fun of them, or urge them on. They were all they had left.

Sam slammed his book closed just as Samantha stood. He didn't remember crossing the room, or reaching out.

Sam kissed her, smashing their mouths together until he tasted blood, sweet on his tongue. Their legs tangled and she staggered backwards a few steps, dragging him with her. She was cooler than Dee, but she held on harder, her nails stinging down his back like scourges. It was perfect, rough enough to keep him from thinking.

This was all he had, now. Best to get used to it.

She grabbed at his shirt, fighting with him on the buttons, nearly ripping his T-shirt as they pulled it up and over his head. Her jacket hit the floor, followed by her soft cotton shirt. Her skin was uneven, slick scar tissue at her back where she'd been killed, a burn on her shoulder from Meg's possession, a dozen dents and rises where violence had left marks. Nothing at all like Dee's pristine new form, but her fingers were exploring him with the same eagerness and that was what he needed now.

He shoved her back against the wall, hands worming under her bra to cup her breasts even as she tore at his belt. His jeans slumped loose around his hips; she shoved hers down and shook them off, cursing into his mouth as she heeled off her boots at the same time.

"Condom," he panted.

"I'm on the pill." Of course: she was organized, reliable. And she would have used condoms with everyone else, just to be sure. But safety didn't matter now.

He picked her up by her hips, sliding her up the wall just enough that he could sink inside her. It had been years since he'd gone bareback, and the rush of wet heat nearly made him come, but she grabbed his shoulders and hitched herself up and he bit his lip until he was in control again.

Her thighs clamped around his hips as they started moving. There was no uncertainty; they were already galloping, pushing into each other as if they could become one person, not two half-wrecked versions of the same desperate sinner. She fisted her hands in his hair, her fingernails sharp against his scalp, and he nosed at her neck until she tilted her head back and let him bite a line down her jaw and throat. She tasted of salt and a hint of the sweetness he remembered from Dee. Her arms were solid blocks of muscle, unyielding even as he gripped hard enough to bruise.

She was melting quicksilver around him, arching back so that he had to shove forward to keep her pinned against the wall, grunting as he thrust up. Her heels dug into his back, painful pressure that made the pleasure twist even higher in him. Her hair hid her eyes as she screamed, so tight slick fierce that he followed her as soon as he felt her start to come.

He ended up leaning against her, still pinning her to the wall, wiped out, breathing in the hot wet air between them. She was still twitching, almost uncomfortable but not enough to motivate him to move. Her nails scraped against his skin as her hands clenched, making him shiver.

"Sam," she said, her voice wrecked. He hummed into her shoulder and thought about putting her down. "Sam," she repeated more urgently.

Reluctantly, he bent his knees and slid all the way out with a gasp, letting her fall back against the wall. "Wanna—" he began, pushing his hair out of his face as he checked to see whether she was okay—

Her eyes were yellow, shot through with green-brown veins.

"The fifty-ninth seal just broke."

****

At least, Sam thought, at least this couldn't be happening back in his world, because he wasn't there. He'd mistaken Dean's role—guardian, not part of the seal—but he had to believe that he'd taken all his folly and destruction with him.

Now that they were down to the last seven seals, Sam expected that things would happen quickly. Samantha checked the news on her computer and reported that there had been at least twelve earthquakes 5.0 or above in the last hour. Over a thousand dolphins had beached themselves on the California shore. The Ganges had, almost instantly, turned red.

Someone pounded on the door.

Samantha went over, picking up a gun from the side table as she went, but as soon as she looked through the peephole she shot the lock and opened the door.

The man who stood on the threshold was a brunette, maybe an inch taller than Samantha, clean Midwestern good looks and deep blue eyes. His eyes flicked over Sam, stopping for a second on his tattoo, and then dismissed him. "Get rid of your fuck, we've got problems."

"He's a friend," Samantha said. "You have anything useful to tell me, Ruby?"

Ruby snorted and stepped into the room. Sam searched around until he found his T-shirt, then threw on his overshirt.

If this was Ruby's meatsuit in this dimension, Sam must be looking at the body of one of Samantha's unfortunate hookups. For some reason, that made him feel worse than Cindy/Susie/whoever had.

"Where's your sister?" Ruby demanded instead of answering. "And don't bother lying."

Samantha shrugged. "She's not in play any more."

Sam saw the despair flicker over Ruby's face before it went blank. "You always meant for D—Dee to kill her," he realized. "You knew how the gauntlets would affect Samantha, how neither of them would be able to stay in control for long. You were counting on that, so that Dee would take her out before Lilith could get to her. That was your plan to save the world, wasn't it?"

Ruby grimaced. "You think you know a lot, new boy," she said dangerously.

Before she could try to beat him up, Samantha held up her hand. "It's okay if it's true," she said softly. "Just give me another option."

Ruby made a sound, nearly a scream, strange and terrible to hear from a male body. "There is no other option!" The mirror over the dresser shattered, shards spraying in all directions.

"If I died some other way—"

"Do you have some other person who loves you more than anything and can use Michael's sword on you?"

Samantha didn't even bother looking over at Sam. "Not at the moment, no."

Ruby crossed her arms over her chest. Her voice was icy. "Then Lilith will bring you back and use you. She can even use your corpse. So if I were you I'd prepare to spend the rest of my short and unpleasant life fighting."

Samhain had been able to use the warlock's dead body, Sam recalled. In fact, the supercharged demon had apparently _needed_ a 700-year-old practitioner's body, dead or not, in which to manifest. Otherwise there would have been no need for the evil siblings to offer each other to Samhain.

Maybe Lucifer also needed something more than the factory standard model of human.

Boy King, indeed. More like, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

He could see the horror on Samantha's face as she worked through the same thoughts. And he knew, down to his marrow, that Samantha wouldn't be able to just let it happen. She'd fight Lucifer's possession, and her struggle itself would break the seal, according to the prophecy.

Sam couldn't feel his legs. He only knew he was standing because he hadn't fallen down. Even without demonic powers, rage shook his body, like he was made of ninety-nine percent fury instead of water. He'd given everything to protect Dean, and Samantha had done the same, but they couldn't get out from under the black cloud of destiny, more evil than any demon.

"Do you want me to kill you?" Samantha asked evenly.

Sam jerked his head up. It was a useful question. If Ruby wanted true death, then she really had concluded it was hopeless.

"Shit," Ruby swore, turning away. "Ask me tomorrow," she said at last. "If you're still alive."

Sam closed the door behind her. "Maybe I should draw a Devil's Trap around the room," he suggested. Ruby's ability to walk right up was a reminder that other demons might do the same thing.

Samantha shook her head. "I need to be able to move around."

They couldn't look at each other. They'd both agreed on the plan, gambled and lost the world. After a while, Sam went to the bed nearest the door, the one Samantha hadn't been using, and knelt beside it. This reality's angels couldn't hear his prayers (not that they'd listened before), but he was out of ideas.

Samantha hesitated before she copied him. When he glanced over, he saw that her nose was bleeding, and her lips were cracked and swollen, as if even mouthing the prayers had burned. He felt even worse for her: she was going to die with the demonic blood still twisting hot inside her, the direct cause of Hell on earth. At least he'd been able to escape for a few hours.

****

The terrible irony was, they'd been raised to fight. Refusal to submit to another's will was ingrained so deep in him that he was even ready to fight with Samantha, even though they were the same person.

Of course, they weren't the same any more, now that Sam had crossed over and disabled his demon blood.

Sam's demon couldn't fight.

He jumped to his feet, ignoring the whining of his muscles, and started shuffling through the books Samantha had spread out on what should have been Dee's bed. Behind him, Samantha made an inquisitive noise. "Have the final seals started to break?" he asked her, flipping through _The Book of the Worm_.

"Two," she admitted.

"What if _we_ summoned Lucifer?" Sam asked.

Her eyes narrowed. This was probably the way she looked at Dee when Dee suggested one of her stupider plans.

"No, listen," Sam insisted. "If we're right, he's supposed to manifest in Sam Winchester. We summon him into _me_, you kill him with the knife, Hell goes back under." The very thought was a relief. He'd screwed up so much, and now that he'd managed to get Dean clear, he could rest. Dean wouldn't ever have to know. And Samantha would do fine, because—because she had to.

Samantha opened her mouth to object, then tilted her head and thought about it. He appreciated that she wasn't wasting time with regrets. She could double up on his behalf if she got the chance later.

He knew she'd come to the same conclusion he had, which was that it was possible, maybe even likely, that Sam's body couldn't hold Lucifer properly in this reality. If so, it stood to reason that Lucifer would be vulnerable if he tried to use the wrong host.

"But _can_ you summon anything, here?" Samantha asked, her nose wrinkling in a way that under other circumstances Sam would have found half charming and half deathly embarrassing.

Most witches and warlocks had never been dosed with demon blood, and magic still worked for them. Sam rummaged for the chalk, not bothering to say 'one way to find out' aloud.

****

Sam tried a minor scrying, just as proof of concept. He was able to make the front entrance to the main library at Stanford appear in a bowl of water. Then Samantha sliced through his tattoo, which hurt the way knife wounds always did, but worse because she took a chunk of inked skin just in case a thin slice was insufficient. She didn't look at his face while she bandaged the cut. The care she took reminded him of the way death-row doctors would wipe an inmate's arm down to sterilize it before injecting the lethal dose, somewhere between futility and mockery. But he guessed he did need to stop the bleeding.

The summoning would have to be carefully done. They could have used Latin, or Sumerian, but it was easier to stick with English and just as effective, if you didn't feel the need for random showmanship. They worked on the wording for a couple of hours, during which time two more seals fell. It was a solid spell, Sam thought, simple and direct. They would have made excellent lawyers, in some other worlds than their own.

Neither of them was willing to chance a trip even as far as the vending machines, so they were reduced to eating the jerky and trail mix out of Dee's emergency stash, washing it down with lukewarm water from the bathroom sink. The room stank of them, sweat and fear and old sex, and under that the hint of rotten eggs that Sam almost didn't notice any more.

In the middle of her thousandth circuit around the room, Samantha jerked back like someone had grabbed her by the neck and collapsed.

When he helped her to her feet, blood-tinged tears were slipping from her eyes. "One more," she whispered, not really to him. Her skin was clammy, unpleasant to touch, and her sweaty hair stuck in dark chunks to her neck and shoulders. Her face looked little better than a skull, the skin too thin over bone, red spots high on her cheeks like demon kisses. He settled his arm around her shoulders and helped her over to the bed, where they sat down, like two crows perched on a powerline.

"You want me to close the circle?" What Sam had drawn was nothing like a Devil's Trap, and he imagined that, if he'd still had active demon blood, it would have felt cozy. It was a welcome mat for darkness.

Samantha shook her head. "Wait." If they jumped ahead of the penultimate seal, they probably wouldn't be able to raise Lucifer, and Sam wasn't sanguine about what other entities might answer the call.

Sam put his hand between her shoulderblades, pressing against the tense muscle.

"Hey," she said, tilting her head back. The blood was already drying, flaking against her cheeks. "You remember when we were kids, Dee always said Mom had one full-time job up in Heaven?"

Sam smiled. _Looking after you, Sam_. "I remember when I was about ten, I asked—"

"'Then who looks after you?' and she said—"

"'I'm so awesome I don't need anyone to watch over me.'" He snorted fondly and felt the echo move through her body.

"They'll take care of each other, right?" Samantha asked, letting her head slump further so that it rested on his shoulder. Her skin was too cool and her hair smelled more like evergreen than the citrus and leather he kept expecting, but he pulled her in tighter anyway.

"Of course they will," he told her. "And you—you settle down, okay? Let somebody else do the cleanup. You've—it's enough."

"Sure," she said, easy enough that he knew what she really meant was that she had no particular thought of surviving. The future was a fogbank and they were rushing towards it at a hundred miles an hour. And it was unfair of him to expect anything else from her, since she was getting stuck with the hardest part. He got to check out, but she had to stay.

They needed a distraction. "I also remember Dean telling me how I could get a girl pregnant by holding her hand."

Samantha gave a choked-off giggle. "I pretended to believe her."

Sam nudged her with his hip. "Remember who you're talking to. You believed her for a _month_."

"Speak for yourself, girls mature faster." She waited a second. "It was a _week_, tops."

The silence then was nearly comfortable.

When Samantha pitched backwards, Sam spared a second to make sure she wasn't swallowing her own tongue and then hurried to complete the circle. He didn't feel a thing when it closed, but Samantha moaned like she was being beaten, her back arching off the bed and then collapsing.

He slashed his palms with the blade he'd set aside and squeezed his fists tight, until blood bubbled out between his fingers and down onto the sigils drawn in chalk mixed with graveyard dust.

The grinding fear of the past few months was as familiar and unremarkable as his pulse, but apparently it could still get more intense. His heart thumped like a bird with a broken wing, and he tasted silver, his tongue thick and swollen in his dry mouth.

"I am Sam Winchester," he said. "Azazel prepared me and I am here. I am your vessel, Lucifer, Light-Bringer, son of Dawn."

The room turned gray, colors leaching out with the light. He needed a second to realize that dark clouds had covered the sun, turning late afternoon to dusk in an instant.

"I am Sam Winchester," he repeated, kneeling in the middle of the circle of blood he'd created. "Azazel prepared me and I am here." Demon summonings required intent. But magic was a little like law, too. Sometimes it was possible to follow the letter and disregard the spirit. "I am your vessel, Lucifer, made of fire."

He shuddered and had to struggle to continue. He didn't want to die. The thought was a little surprising, but it was also irrelevant. He didn't want to die possessed by the worst demon in Creation; so what? And if they were wrong about summoning Lucifer—well, then he would most assuredly get the punishment he deserved. If he was very, very lucky, watching the apocalypse from a front-row seat would drive him mad.

Sam forced his mouth open and began again.

Samantha grunted, and he heard her pry herself off the bed and shuffle towards him until she was right behind him. Sam kept up the chant, his voice wobbling like the car when Dean had first started teaching him to drive. His hands were ice, his still-streaming blood sucking heat from him with every drop that fell to the carpet.

It occurred to him that Castiel and Uriel had always seen this moment coming, except they'd been completely mistaken about the underlying intent. He wondered if there was a lesson in that.

Crash and sear of lightning outside, so near that the thunder hit even as Sam's eyes were still whited out. The strikes quickly sped up until they were almost constant, brightening the room past what the cheap lightbulbs had been able to do. The noise was like being inside a snare drum. Samantha was kneeling now as well, her knee bruisingly hard against his calf. He stumbled in his recitation, just for a moment, fighting the staticy terror that threatened to crowd out everything else in his head.

Sam's voice was growing hoarse with repetition when he felt the first pulse from below, a hot spike up his thigh and through his groin, almost like he'd pissed himself.

He didn't remember Meg's possession, not even the first moments when she'd been pouring down his throat, so he had no way to tell whether this was anything like.

His chanting faltered. Samantha reached around, Ruby's knife flashing white with reflected lightning. Sam pulled his shirt free from his jeans to give her better access, blood from his fingers soaking into the cheap cotton like a preview of coming attractions. The blade was inches from his skin.

Sam swallowed and resumed the chant, inviting Lucifer further in. Stiletto stabs of pain, molten orange, making his heart seize in his chest. His lungs choked closed and he could almost feel the cells start to die, squeezed of oxygen. He wanted to vomit but he was losing even autonomic functions, shoved aside in his own body like curtains being parted to let in the dawn light. His vision was jaundiced, the stupid tawdry motel room distorting, melting as he watched.

A roar came from his throat, and the symbols on the floor burst into flames, flaring and filling the room with the smell of burnt bone, leaving black smudges like a starfield in reverse. "Hic sum!" his mouth screamed. "Hic sum!"

The lightning outside was no longer lightning, but a veil of fire, reaching from the sky to the earth, blood-red.

He began to come off of his knees, ready to stand—

And pushed himself deeper onto the knife.

His arms went out as he screamed, but Samantha held on, digging through him like his flesh was no more resistant than water, slashing side to side and then up and down. He could feel her fists sink into his abdomen. His head dropped, still not under his control, and he saw the familiar crackling of fire around the edges of his mortal wound.

He coughed, and felt something thick and hot run down his chin.

The pain hammered him flat just as the embers died out, leaving him alone in his body, but not in any more control. His blood was burnt metal in his mouth, choking him, and the hole in his middle was pumping his life out fast enough to count in seconds.

"Sam?" He knew that voice, but it wasn't the right one. Dean, where was Dean? He should be here, letting Sam's head sag onto his shoulder, holding him up, holding him together. "Sam, the sky's clear."

He was pretty sure that ought to be meaningful, but he just _hurt_ so much.

Over the sea-roar in his ears, he heard another sound, an arrhythmic pounding. The knife left his body like a tooth pulling free, a deep sucking sound followed by a fresh gout of blood. He was staring at the ceiling now, abandoned, as the person who'd been holding him—Samantha, he remembered, Samantha—hurried away. More by accident than design, his head fell to the side and he saw her. Her hands were red almost to the elbow and she had the knife raised in one hand as she opened the door with the other.

The fortune-teller sailed inside like the _QE2_, lacking only an actual volley of trumpets. Her stumpy little dog was clutched under one arm, much like a purse that drooled. She looked at him and his body clenched and jerked, the pain fading into manageability. His blood was everywhere, but it wasn't going any further; she'd frozen him at three-quarters dead.

Samantha fell back, possibly to get out of range of the dog's breath.

"Here to gloat?" Samantha asked wearily, and turned back to Sam.

The fortune-teller tilted her head and her soft roundness dissolved into the Trickster's ratface. His faded blue T-shirt said "This Way Up" with an arrow pointing towards his crotch. The dog was now a rolled-up newspaper.

Sam let out a tired breath, staring up at the Trickster. He'd had the thought in the back of his mind for a while. There just hadn't been any point in bringing it up.

The Trickster was a violator of boundaries. The line between realities was a pretty big boundary. Not to mention that the Trickster was associated with gender-switching in many cultures, so bringing Dee across would have been just the kind of private joke to satisfy a god who liked to torment humans for sport.

He was living on the Trickster's sufferance. An extended death scene was something else for the rat bastard to savor.

"Now, Sammy," the god said chidingly. "Is that any way to think about your savior?"

"You're not my savior," he forced out along with another bubble of blood. His gut felt like an alligator was chewing at it. He tried to curl inwards, but his limbs wouldn't cooperate.

The Trickster shrugged, kneeling so that he could get a better look at Sam's wounds. He ran his fingers through the blood pooling on the floor. "I kinda wanted to see what you boys would do with a distaff version. And you did not disappoint. I knew Dean was a pervert, but you, Sammy—" he shook his head as he wiped his fingers clean on Sam's shirt, sending new spikes of pain through Sam's chest. "Whew. And Samantha, late to the party but making up for lost time."

Sam felt his face screw up in disgust, and knew Samantha was doing the same. He really would have loved to see how Samantha's demonic powers did against a small-g god who'd been deprived of worshipers for centuries.

"What do you want?" he asked. The pathetic uncertainty in his voice took him straight back to childhood, when he'd asked Dean over and over why their lives had to suck so much.

"Just to point out that you guys really screwed the pooch this time. I thought you had the brains to realize that you needed a full swap."

"I think we've paid for that," Samantha said, tugging the Trickster away from Sam. He wasn't going to get to die with dignity—more than anything, the Trickster hated dignity—but he appreciated the attempt.

The Trickster tilted his head. "Well, Sammy here's well on his way to paying the 'ultimate price'"—he made air quotes—"but you, my dear, seem to be getting off scot free."

"You really couldn't be more wrong," Samantha said as she crouched to put herself between Sam and the Trickster, her hand settling into Sam's where it laid limp on the floor. She curled her fingers around his.

"You are just so darling," the Trickster said. His T-shirt now said STUPID'S WITH ME. "Also, as much as it pains me to admit it, you did manage to preserve this dimension's existence, albeit in a bumbling and overly dramatic way, and I did spend all this time decorating. So I'm going to grant you a dying wish."

Sam couldn't suppress his laugh, even though he felt like a combine had rolled over him.

"No, no," the Trickster said, his face falling as if Sam had hurt his feelings. "No tricks, no monkey's paw. A pure gift from me to you."

A gift horse from the Trickster was most likely a pooka. Sam shook his head.

The Trickster frowned. "Did I say this was optional? Tell me your wish, or I'll make one up for you. But you know me, I get creative. Unless you tell me, and then I'll play it straight."

The blood loss was working on him now. The pain was fading, and he started to shiver with cold. Samantha squeezed his hand, reminding him that he still had a job to do.

"Make them happy," he said, or thought he did. His face felt numb. The Trickster's face was neutral. "Dean," he tried to clarify, though the name came out sounding the way it probably had when he'd been two. "Dean 'n Dee." And then he turned his head, because black dots were beginning to swarm at the edges of his vision, like angry cockroaches, and he refused to die with the Trickster's smug face as the last thing he saw.

Instead, he was staring at his hand, joined with Samantha's. Their fingers were shining and sticky, scarlet with Sam's blood. Samantha's grip shook his nerveless fingers as she trembled above him.

"This is gonna sting," the Trickster warned.

Sam let his eyes fall closed and tried to imagine his mother, smiling at him as her ghost had smiled, and his father, rising from Hell to vindication.

Every nerve took fire; he was being roasted alive, seared into charcoal. He was skewered, his muscles twisting and his bones cracking, hot marrow dripping through his ripped flesh to fall into the flames and make them jump higher.

Darkness wrapped around him and squeezed.

****

"Sam! Sam!"

Something was shoving at his chest, pushing air into his lungs with rib-bruising force.

He coughed, then blinked. Dean's terrified face hovered above him.

_Holy fuck_, he thought, then curled up as a coughing fit took him over.

Above him, Dean continued to say his name, interspersed with curses.

The fucking Trickster and his one last trick. He patted his stomach. His trembling hand came away dripping with blood, but there was no wound underneath.

Sam was going to be grateful soon—he might even cry with relief—but right now he was just shaking from his body's continued belief in its imminent demise.

"Hey," Sam managed after a moment, trying to tilt his head to see Dean.

Dean stopped babbling like a cork had been stuffed in his mouth. His hands were not quite gentle as they flipped Sam onto his back, patting his chest and nearly slapping his cheeks, checking him over.

"You're here," Sam said, dizzy with incredulity. And, because it was true and because he was still oxygen-deprived: "Missed you."

Sam had never heard Dean make that noise, something between a whimper and a laugh. He was still trying to figure it out when Dean started pulling him to his feet. He struggled, hindering more than helping, until at last he was standing.

He stared at Dean, the face he'd never expected to see again, the crow's feet that were the only sign of Dean's actual age, the ocean-green eyes, the freckles like a dusting of cinnamon on top of his tanned skin. He loved Dean so much he thought he actually might crack open with it.

"Where's Dee?" he asked.

Dean punched him, putting his shoulder into the blow.

Something split in his cheek. Dean was breathing so hard that Sam thought he was going to hyperventilate. He didn't move forward for another punch, just stood there and looked at Sam like he'd looked at Azazel when the demon had been possessing Dad.

Sam had obviously skipped a step or two.

"I'm so sorry," he said when he could make words come out through the pain.

"Sorry?" Dean repeated, his voice high and outraged. "Sorry's for buying regular instead of premium. Sorry's for forgetting the salt. Sorry's _even_ for leavin' in the middle of the night so you can go practice your demon powers with your demon whore." He stopped, opening and closing his mouth as he blinked and the tears caught in his lashes.

Sam couldn't stop himself from grabbing Dean, holding him tight as Dean shook, too overcome to struggle. "I thought if I left you'd be happy," he said into Dean's shoulder. His cheek was on fire, pain like a golden vein of lava where he could already feel the swelling. He deserved that and more.

Dean made a small confused sound.

"I thought, you know, you and Dee. Hunts the way you wanted them. No more fighting about the music. No more getting dragged to libraries."

Dean reached up and weakly cuffed Sam on the back of his head. "Dickwad. Somebody always has to go to the library."

Put like that, Sam did feel pretty stupid.

Hold on, if the Trickster had granted his wish, then—

His smile hurt, but he intended to keep wearing it unless Dean beat it off him.

They stayed pressed together, which Dean was probably allowing because it meant he didn't have to show his face. Dean breathed out, deep and ragged, and started talking almost directly into Sam's neck. "We just about killed each other, tryin' to figure it out. We got the symbols right but we couldn't make the window open to talk to you. And then the damn thing just popped back up outta nowhere, and Samantha jumped out all bloody and told me to get my ass through, which I did. What _happened_, Sam?"

"We tricked Lucifer."

He expected a demand for details, but Dean was silent. His hands wrapped around Sam's forearms, pushing until Sam was forced half a step backwards. "That was your plan?" Dean wasn't looking at Sam's face, which was how Sam realized that Dean was asking something different.

Sam grabbed Dean's shoulders. "I wanted to do the right thing for you. And you had that sword, and it felt like you wanted to—" Dean flinched, and Sam could tell that he'd said precisely the wrong words. Dean was going to blame himself for being abandoned. "I think those demon gloves fucked with my head," he corrected. That wasn't all of it, but sometimes scapegoats were useful. "I should've brought you through right off."

"I swear I'm puttin' you in handcuffs," Dean said, his eyes still fixed on Sam's chest. He made no effort to shake free of Sam's grasp. "Every time I let you out of my sight, it's like you shut off that big brain and do the dumbest thing possible."

"Fine, then," Sam said, still grinning like a jack-o-lantern, and closed the small distance between them so that he was wrapped around Dean again. "I'll stay with you if you stay with me."

****

Dean eventually made a couple of attempts to wriggle out of Sam's embrace, but they were all pretty pathetic, so Sam ignored them. Then there was a moment when the world seemed to hold its breath, and when Sam raised his head from Dean's shoulder Uriel and Castiel were there with them.

Adrenalin made his heart jolt like a target at a shooting range. He spun so that he was shoulder to shoulder with Dean, who was blinking stunned eyes at the two angels. They were examining the Winchesters like a fox might look at a distant object, trying to determine whether it was a leaf or a mouse.

Sam felt an echo of the old reverence. Half a year of terror hadn't erased a lifetime of belief. These angels didn't know him, but he knew them.

Dean sniffed and rubbed the back of his hand over his mouth. "Uh, we were kinda in the middle of something, so—you guys got business here?"

Uriel tilted his head, like a bird or a dinosaur. "Where are Deanna and Samantha Winchester?"

"Gone," Dean said, almost apologetic. He was watching Castiel, but Castiel seemed indifferent to everything, a mannequin in a coat that suddenly seemed two sizes too large for him.

"You won't find them," Sam added, though Uriel didn't look away from Dean. There was a slight eau de bluff about Sam's claim, because if the angels could manage lateral thinking they might be able to come up with the same strategy Sam had used to find Dee's reality, using Sam and Dean themselves to orient the search. Sam was hoping that confusion, and the fact that angels couldn't perceive them properly, would protect them. That, and if it was over, maybe Heaven didn't do revenge.

Sam didn't see him move, but Uriel was only a few inches away, staring at Dean. Sam didn't consider that an improvement. "What has happened here?"

"I think it's called free will," Sam told him.

The air in the room whipped around as if turned by a great turbine. "This was the only opportunity for the eschaton for a thousand years," Uriel said, words dropping like stone blocks. "A millennium more of _this_." Sam could hear it all in his tone, children born only to starve, mothers hit by cars, hurricanes and crematoria and famines and toxic spills. The elaborate symphony of death and suffering that God apparently could only alleviate by wiping the slate clean.

Sam guessed that it was up to the humans, then.

"A thousand years," Dean said brightly, giving Uriel his most obnoxious grin. "Not bad."

The air thickened and the windows buzzed with the pressure of the angel's anger. All light seemed to draw inwards, into Uriel, until the rest of the room was ocean-dark. As the tension screwed tighter, the lightbulbs in all the lamps began to shatter, going off like popcorn.

"Castiel," Dean called out. The angel's face was still an angry incurious mask, but he held up a hand to Uriel and the silent current in the room ebbed. "I've got a message from Dee for you."

Castiel blinked, almost like a person. "What is it?"

Dean stepped towards Castiel, and nobody but Sam would have known that he would rather have run screaming. He took hold of the lapels of Castiel's ridiculous overcoat, pulling himself up on his toes so that he could speak into Castiel's ear, though he didn't lower his voice. "On the many, _many_ occasions when you think back on how you failed, you remember how you started recruiting me with the Word of God. And when that didn't work, you went for the threat of Hellfire. You remember how you didn't trust God's love to be sufficient, and you think about how _great_ God is."

He shoved back, like pushing off from a statue, and turned away from Castiel, dismissing the angel from his attention.

There was a noise like the beating of a thousand ravens' wings, and the angels were gone. The glass rattled in the windows and the door slammed closed even though Sam hadn't thought it was open.

After a moment, Dean laughed, a high disbelieving sound, and stumbled over to the bed just before his legs gave out. He pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes. "Holy shit."

"Yeah," Sam said, his own voice wobbling. He decided that Dean had the right idea, and plopped down right next to him, ignoring how the bed whined beneath their combined weight. "I thought you, uh, you liked Castiel."

"I did," Dean admitted. "Dude tells you God loves you and has a special plan for you, kinda hard not to feel that warm glow. But that's not—I never chose that. I liked him 'cause if I didn't like him I couldn't—It was hard enough gettin' past Hell, and hearing how I was supposed to keep you from your own blood. And he _talked_ to me."

Sam mulled that over for a bit. Stockholm Syndrome for angels. It made as much sense as any of the rest of it. "Did Dee really give you that message?"

Dean laughed again. "You bet your ass. I, uh, kinda think she's smarter than I am. Also meaner."

"Also pretty confident," Sam added.

Dean jostled his shoulder. "Sure, dude. She knew you and the other Samantha—" Sam shoved back—"were gonna get it done."

They sat like that, looking around the room. The carpet was a total loss, scorched where it wasn't soaked with blood. The place smelled like a combination of slaughterhouse and gym.

"So what was Samantha like? You get along okay?" Sam checked out Dean's profile and saw badly feigned indifference. He wouldn't have placed the underlying emotion as jealousy if he hadn't had inside information.

He shrugged. "Not so different from me, I guess." And then he remembered putting her up against the wall and couldn't fight the flush.

Dean looked at him oddly, then gaped. "The fuck you did," he said, and shook his head in a version of his standard amused condescension that made Sam think maybe that expression was _always_ a put-on. "Sisters," he said, making the word itself sound lascivious.

Not that Dean hadn't told Sam in excruciating detail about various exploits involving twins, half of which were possibly true. "Shut up, you only wish you could've—"

Sam stopped talking before he accidentally stepped on another conversational landmine. Dean stared at him for a moment longer before he pinked too, high on his cheeks, and flicked his eyes away.

Fortunately they had plenty of other business to do. Bits and pieces of the other Winchesters were still scattered around: books and weapons, lotions and and wadded-up tissues. Later, Sam would have to make sure their clothes went to someplace that could use them—he wasn't about to let Dean perv on the girls' underwear, that was for damn sure—but right now he was content to rest by Dean's side. The rest of the world could turn inside out and it wouldn't matter. Everything he needed was here in this room, and it was the same for Dean. Except that Dean would also list the car out in the parking lot as among his needs, but Sam was prepared to concede the point.

He wondered how Dee and Samantha were doing. If the Trickster had kept his promise, then Sam and Dean's world was also okay. Without Dean's sacrifice or Sam's demon blood, maybe the world couldn't end in Heaven's favor _or_ Hell's.

"Might oughta call Bobby," Dean suggested after a while.

Sam reluctantly rose and went to the laptop Samantha had abandoned on the kitchenette table. Sitting next to it was what must be her cellphone.

He hit redial and waited for the call to go through. He hadn't bothered telling their Bobby goodbye. There'd been so little time, and he'd been drawn so far into himself that he'd barely seen _Dean_. Bobby had always reminded Sam just a hair too much of Dad anyway. But now he wondered whether Dean had called, and what he might have said. Maybe he'd tell Sam, if Sam asked.

"Samantha?" Bobby's cautious voice answered. Sam smiled. He wouldn't have bet much on the plan either, in Bobby's place.

"This is Sam Winchester," he said. "Dee and Samantha made it to the other side. It's over, Bobby."

There was a long pause in which Sam imagined Bobby's skepticism curling through the air, almost like a demon, crossing the distance between them. "I suspect I'd better have a look at you boys."

"Bring the holy water," Sam agreed. "She told you where she was holed up?"

"I'll be there in four hours," Bobby said, and hung up. Sam grinned at the phone. Something—holy water. Would holy water have any effect on them in this reality?

Which reminded him to pull up his shirt and check. The Trickster had healed him, but there was a white cicatrix, a triangle of scar destroying the anti-possession symbol on his skin. "I'm going to need a new tattoo," he informed Dean, who was still lounging on the bed.

Dean groaned and flopped backwards, splaying himself out like he was making a—heh. "This time it oughta be on your ass."

"You'd better get a new one too, just to be safe." Dean raised his hand in a one-fingered salute, but Sam knew he'd go along, if only so that he could deprive Sam of complaining rights.

"We're also gonna need new gear," Sam realized. That was nothing new. There'd been more than a few times when they'd hustled out of town with nothing more than what was in the car. He expected that the car would be well-equipped, but they'd need new clothes, and every weapon that had been customized would have to be traded in.

Having those problems at the top of his list was such an unbelievable relief that he nearly started laughing. And then he saw no reason not to laugh, so he did, until he was bent over and shaking with it.

"Sam?" Dean was there immediately, crouching down next to his chair and putting a hand on his shoulder.

Sam pulled it together. "No, I'm fine. Just happy."

Dean didn't look entirely convinced. "You know, you can get out now. Start over."

He deliberately hadn't let himself think about it, but the knowledge was sudden and complete. The best strategy, despite the humiliation factor, would be to fake high school records—much easier than college, especially because they'd be _old_ records—and take the SATs. Even without recommendation letters, a good enough story would get him into a decent state school, and from there the world (the new world) would open up all over again.

He didn't have funky demon powers, or even enemies who _believed_ he had funky demon powers. He didn't need revenge. He was completely free to choose.

He smiled at Dean, still squatting beside him. "My agenda's more beer and wings right now."

But Dean wasn't smiling back. "You should do it," he said.

"Dean—"

"Mom wanted you to," he said, like each word had been pulled out of his gut through muscle and skin. "She didn't want her kids hunting."

Sam believed him, even though Dean had never before shared that tidbit about his trip to the past. It was exactly the kind of information Dean would squirrel away and pull out each night like a razor to cut himself with.

"What about you?" he asked, because he knew this variant of Dean-the-martyr. "Given that you just nearly broke my jaw for leaving you, can I expect that you'll join me in some kind of stable, boring job?"

Sure enough, Dean shrugged and looked down. "That was 'cause you _lied_ and _ran off_ and I didn't know you were safe."

Sam was in no position to give a good answer to that, so he didn't try. Leaving Dean for his own good was a seriously Dad move, now that he thought about it without the overlay of terror and demon rage. He'd make it up to Dean somehow.

When Dean met his eyes again, Sam was shocked to see that Dean wasn't even trying to hide the tears. "This, you and me hunting, was her _worst nightmare_, Sam. She wanted _out_. Don't let—don't let me keep you in this life, now that you get a do-over. Don't let her down."

How Dean managed to convince himself that _Sam_ was the emo one was an eternal mystery.

Sam sighed, twisting in his chair so that he could grab Dean's wrist and hold on to him, the hard lines of Dean's bracelet cutting into his palm. "She was wrong." Before Dean could do more than open his mouth, he barrelled on. "She wasn't wrong about the pain and the danger. Nobody should _have_ to hunt. But _you_ can't know that someone's in trouble and not do something about it. And neither can I."

Dean's eyes were still wet, his face flushed and his breathing too fast. His pulse jumped under Sam's fingers. "You could help people without hunting," he said.

Sam tried not to smile, because Dean would just think he was being patronizing. "Maybe so," he told Dean. "That's something we'll have to think about. Together." And then, because Dean was all but begging for it, he pulled Dean up, standing as he did so, until they were hugging, again. Dean sighed and Sam could _feel_ him rolling his eyes, but Sam was prepared to tolerate that.

He hooked his chin over Dean's shoulder and stared at his hands, wrapped around Dean's back. Even if they hadn't been strong enough to pull Dean out of Hell, they'd been sufficient for the rest of it, and Castiel was nothing but a scar now. He held on to his brother and pretended he didn't hear Dean sniffling.

****

Eventually, though, even Sam had to admit that they'd crossed the line into weird, so he let Dean go, and Dean took the opportunity to go out and grab a pizza. Pineapple and pine nuts, of all things. Dean claimed it was the special, but Sam thought he was probably just testing to see how far he could push Sam before guilt gave way to annoyance. Since the answer was, pretty fucking far, Sam didn't even blink at bizarre toppings.

After they ate, Sam decided to check out his new computer, which was a Mac, Samantha having opted for style over economy. Samantha's desktop picture was of a well-built guy with short brown hair and deep blue eyes, posed to highlight his arms. Sam winced and changed it to autumn leaves.

While Sam was checking her bookmarks and finding them very much like his own, only better organized, Dean wandered out to the Impala for an inventory. He came back bitching nonstop about all the details that would need to be fixed, casting aspersions on the car-related judgment of women in general and Dee in particular. "She let her Sam install a _CD changer_! Least it's in the trunk," he grumbled. Fortunately, they had enough guns to get straight to business if they needed to, though Sam was hoping for a bit of a break.

Traditionally, saviors of the world were entitled to a respite. Often there was a campfire and joyous song. Even if Sam and Dean couldn't hope for medals from a grateful nation, he figured he could swing s'mores on his own.

"Hey," Dean said from his position by the window. "Bobby's truck just pulled in." He headed towards the door and Sam rose to follow.

****

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph," Bobby said when they approached him, careful to stay a respectful distance away. Sam reminded himself that a hug was probably not in the cards. Their own Bobby hadn't started with physical affection until after Sam had died. Anyway, Bobby wasn't paying any attention to Sam.

"What?" Dean asked, squaring his shoulders and looking Bobby straight in the eye, even though Sam could hear the faint crunch of gravel as he shifted uneasily.

"It's just—you're the spittin' image of John Winchester when I met him."

Sam held his breath while Dean froze. Then Dean smiled, like a flashbulb going off. "Really?"

Bobby was shaking his head, but not in negation. "Hard to imagine John Winchester with _sons_. He loved those girls somethin' fierce."

"Then I'm sure he'd be glad to know they're safe," Sam said, and he thought it came out as gently as he meant it.

Bobby looked over at him and snorted. "I still don't know how you managed to pull this one off," he said. "But if there's anyone stubborn enough to stop the apocalypse in its tracks, I guess it'd be a Winchester."

"I don't know," Sam said. "Seems to me it took four of us." And they smirked at each other for a bit before Bobby made them drink holy water (Sam decided not to mention his doubts on that score).

****

They accepted Bobby's invitation to stay at his place while they found their feet. It would take a while to set up new identities, longer if they didn't want to burn those identities immediately with credit card fraud. Sam was hoping to figure out a new way of making a living, now that the threat of arrest wasn't always hanging over them.

He meant to get a move on that as soon as they arrived at Bobby's, but first there was dinner. Bobby seemed surprised that Sam could cook. He got the feeling that Samantha had refused to do so on principle. Then there was beer, and reminiscences that weren't quite the same between Bobby and them. Bobby stared constantly, mostly at Dean, while Dean tried not to squirm, and the whole thing just made Sam unreasonably, unquenchably happy.

Eventually he settled himself into the big couch in Bobby's living room while Dean used a side table to start checking the guns. But before Sam could boot up the laptop, his eye was caught by the headline on the top of the stack of discarded papers at his feet: PRESIDENT CLINTON CALLS FOR ACTION. "Hillary Clinton is president?" he called out.

Bobby stuck his head out from the kitchen, looking mournful. "I don't know what it's like where you're from, but here they only get two terms. That's her husband."

Sam blinked. "Hillary Clinton _was_ president, and now Bill _is_?"

"Yeah," Bobby said, in a tone indicating that he was less than thrilled with that fact. Come to think of it, Sam wasn't overjoyed.

"Dee said it was the same here!" He was aware that his voice was too loud and too high, but he didn't feel the need to control it right at the moment.

Dean and Bobby looked at him. "Son," Bobby said after a pause, "did you honestly think Dee knew who the president was?"

But Dean's face wasn't quite blank; it held a faint mixture of guilt and smugness. "_Dean_," Sam said.

Dean shrugged. "I didn't know about that," he said. "Just, you know, some of the movies are different. Hitchcock's _Kaleidoscope_, dude."

Sam's mouth fell open.

"What, I can't watch the classics? Seriously though: _The Thing 2_! _George Romero's Resident Evil_! The Nicholas Cage _Superman_, Sam, how cool is that? And I, uh, brought the first two _Terminator_ movies, 'cause Lance Henriksen's just wrong."

"Oh my God," Sam said.

Dean grinned at him. "Not any more."

END.


End file.
